German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Thursday condemned alleged plans by members of far-right groups to deport millions of immigrants if the groups come to power, saying that people opposed to Germany’s “free democratic order” were cases for the country’s domestic intelligence agency.
A description of the alleged plan, said to have been discussed at a meeting of far-right groups including representatives of the far-right AfD party in November, was published in an article by the investigative journalists’ group Correctiv on Wednesday.
Scholz: ‘We protect everyone’
Writing on the messaging platform X, formerly known as Twitter, Scholz said: “We will not allow someone to determine who is ‘We’ in our country according to whether a person has a history of immigration or not.”
“We protect everyone — regardless of origin, skin color or how uncomfortable someone is for fanatics with assimilation fantasies,” he wrote.
“Anyone opposing our free democratic order is a case for our domestic intelligence and the judiciary,” he went on. “It is no mere lip service that we learn from history. Democrats must stand together.”
In regards to history, Scholz was referring to the Nazi era in Germany in 1933-1945, when antisemitic race ideology and intolerance of ethnic groups such as Roma and Sinti were integral to the politics of the dictatorship.
Widespread outrage
Those politics eventually led to the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered along with members of other minorities.
The awareness of this past has led to widespread dismay in the country at the Correctiv report.
Armin Schuster, the Christian Democrat (CDU) interior minister of the eastern state of Saxony, where the AfD has more than 30% support in surveys, said he was shocked.
“I was reminded of the darkest part of our recent history,” he told broadcaster MDR, adding that the alleged meeting had “in principle discussed deportations to Africa.”
The AfD, or Alternative for Germany party, was founded as a euroskeptic party in 2013 but has moved ever further to the right since it came into existence. Polling now puts it in second place nationally with around 20% support, far above the 10.3% it won during the last federal election in 2021.
According to recent polling, it is the most popular party in three of Germany’s eastern states, Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg. Elections are scheduled this year in all three of those states.
tj/wd (Reuters, AFP, epd)
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