Provocateurs, conservatives and neo-nazis

Long before the elections last Sunday, the old Bundestag reacted to a bad feeling and annulled a long tradition. To prevent the first session of the new Parliament from being inaugurated by the older member — an honor that would have corresponded to Wilhelm von Gottberg, a newly elected deputy of an alternative for Germany (AfD) of 77 years who has spent most of his life By qualifying as myth the Jewish Holocaust caused by the Nazis, Parliament approved that the inauguration speech was pronounced by Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, the house's longest-lasting MP. Von Gottberg is not alone in his posture. Siegbert Droese, leader of AfD in Leipzig and new deputy, has a car with license plate AH 1818, which responds to the initials of Adolf Hitler and the number used by neo-nazis to refer to the Führer. The 1 and the 8 are the position of the A and the H in the alphabet. Jens Maier, an exmilitant of the SPD, can be converted into the spokesman of the hardest parliamentary current of AfD. Maier believes that the time has come for Germany to remove the burden of guilt for the Holocaust and promised, during the campaign, that it would fight to prevent the "crossbreeding" of the population and the extinction of national identity. Nor did he get tired of qualifying the Muslims as "rabble." Timo Lochocki, a political analyst at the German Marshall Fund, and an expert on ultraright parties, is convinced that members of AfD will use the parliamentary platform to become the only opposition party. "AfD was chosen because many Germans no longer have confidence in the other opposition parties," says the analyst. "In the parliamentary group there are two currents: the right-wing and the enemies of the constitution." "We will have to wait to see what current is imposing." According to Lochocki, some more than half of AfD's voters are disillusioned conservatives with the traditional parties and Angela Merkel. The rest are nationalists and racists, according to some analyses on the origin of the vote with AfD. On Election Day, a total of 1.1 million voters from the CDU and CSU opted for the AfD list, and another half-million SPD did the same. Another 400,000 people voting on the left preferred to support alternative for Germany, something that also made about 40,000 voters of the Greens and liberals. The experts also found that 1.2 million abstentionists were seduced by xenophobic discourse. "That is why it is wrong to qualify AfD members as a neo-nazi club, but there is a latent danger." There is no need to know what position Alexander Gauland will adopt, who is now the most important person in that party. We do not know if he will incline to defend positions of the right or join the neo-nazi group, says Lochocki.