POLITICS-GERMANY: Extreme Right’s Victory Changes Landscape

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yojana Sharma

BERLIN, May 5 1998 (IPS) - The strong showing of the extreme right-wing German People’s Union (DVU) party in last month’s state elections has changed the country’s political landscape ahead of September national elections here.

Political analysts are already pointing to a perceptible move towards the right by the leading conservative parties in the ruling coalition, and a resurgent right wing buoyed by the success of the DVU, whose main targets are foreigners and Jews.

The DVU garnered a shock 13 percent of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt on Apr. 26. Since then, a recent survey in the state of Mecklenberg-Pomerania in north eastern Germany has shown that about eight percent of those polled would vote for the extreme right and another eight percent say they will not rule it out.

The effects of such support is not lost on other groups. The fading extreme-right National Democratic Party (NPD), sought to re- launch itself within days of the vote. It called a massive demonstration of some 3,000 followers in Leipzig on May 1, which ended in rioting, looting and burning barricades. Some 100 were detained after rioters pelted police with stones and bottles and fought running battles with anti-Nazi and left-wing groups.

However the NPD, which was beginning to sink into political insignificance as its aging followers, often former Nazis, died out, continues to be literally rejuvenated. The party has its roots in Western Germany, but is seeking to appeal more to the youth and to expand in the East.

Membership of the NPD is East Saxony and Leipzig, where it boasts some 200 members is beginning to rise says the Dresden Office for the Protection of the Constitution (OPC), which notes seven out of ten new NPD members are under the age of thirty.

“The party is taking advantage of a vacuum,” notes Eckehardt Dietrich, of the Dresden OPC. The office said the NPD had sucked splinter groups into its sphere including skinheads and other violent but normally apolitical groups.

Other extreme-right organisations which had sunk underground have been emerging into the open encouraged by support for the DVU.

In the Berlin district of Spandau, a 200-strong group of Nazi sympathisers marched through the streets on Apr. 30 to celebrate the anniversary of the birthday of Hitler’s henchman Rudolf Hess, held by the Allies in Spandau prison for forty years till his death in 1987.

The Republicans, an extreme-right party which succeeded in getting nine percent of the vote in the prosperous south western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg in March 1996, securing it several seats in the state assembly, publicly claim a massive morale boost from the DVU victory.

“The high proportion of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt has shown that it is possible to establish right-wing parties in the east,” said party spokesman Bernd Bernhard.

In northern Germany, according to the Hamburg OPC, small neo-Nazi groups, with an eye on the growing sympathy for right-wing groups among the youth, have been seeking a merger of various groups under the banner of the ‘Free Nationalists’. Their main purpose: to create ‘foreigner-free zones’ in Germany.

Thomas Wulff, the chairman of the now banned neo-Nazi group ‘National List’ and sentenced in 1995 to six months in prison for ‘inciting the population’ is playing a central role in uniting the groups, many of them banned organisations, the OPC said.

Wulff hopes to “gather together politically banned and homeless neo-Nazis, overcome the splintering of the neo-right and improve their capability,” according to Reinhard Wagner of the Hamburg OPC.

The Federal OPC fears such groups may now evolve a more formal structure permitting them to be active throughout the north and Eastern parts of Germany where unemployment among youth is highest.

The triumphant DVU is the largest of the neo-Nazi groups, with some 15,000 members scattered throughout all Federal states, says the federal OPC. Under normal election law they now stand to get 360,000 dollars in state funds, as about a dozen or more members take their places in the Saxony-Anhalt state assembly.

So far however, money has been no object to the Saxony-Anhalt DVU, who are bankrolled by millionaire publisher and party leader Gerhard Frey. Frey is said to have spent more on its campaign in Saxony Anhalt than the two mainstream parties, the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) led by chancellor Helmut Kohl and the opposition centre-left Social Democrats.

Frey, a Bavarian, has said “for the youth voting for the right has become part of the youth culture like techno (music) and skateboarding.”

However the established parties do not see the right-wing success as a mere fashion. Shocked at the 13 percent vote garnered by the DVU, Conservative parties such as the CDU and the CSU, the CDU’s Bavarian sister party and coalition partner, seem to be moving towards the right in order to try to appeal to the youth.

Within days of the election results CDU and CSU politicians were trying to woo those who voted for the DVU, with promises of a stronger focus on ‘internal security’, including a closer look at the question of migrants and asylum seekers.

“We must make it clear that we take the fears of the public seriously and will provide solutions, and that the extremists with their slogans are merely fishing in troubled waters,” said Bavarian interior minister Gunther Beckstein, known for his anti- foreigner stance, speaking the day after the DVU’s election successes.

But he also distanced himself from the extreme right. “We must reduce immigration to a socially-bearable level and better integrate those upright foreigners already living here,” he said.

Kohl insists his party will remain “a party of the centre,” while his CDU defence minister Volker Ruhe has spoken of a new programme dubbed ‘Future East’, designed to tackle the concerns of voters there.

The DVU has so far not said whether it would field candidates in the Bavarian state election in early September, just before the national elections.

It is unclear how far the CSU will go to counter the messages of the extreme right, especially in a face to face electoral fight, though Bavarian prime minister Edmund Stoiber says “there should be no democratically legitimate party to the right of the CSU”.

But the DVU showing has made it clear that its supporters cannot be easily ignored by the main parties — where ever they are.