German conservatives harshly criticized the Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Wednesday, saying that the far-right party bears some responsibility for the death of Kassel district president Walter Lübcke.
Lübcke, a member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) and a supporter of her refugee policies, was shot dead at his home earlier this month in what prosecutors believe to be a "right-wing extremist" attack.
CDU party leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said Lübcke's murder shows how the AfD's use of "hate and incitement" has overturned taboos in language and "lowered inhibitions so much that they result in pure violence."
Right-wing populism poses "a great danger to every nation," Kramp-Karrenbauer said in Paris, but "looking at our particularly special history in Germany, it's an even greater challenge for us."
Her comments followed controversial remarks from former CDU General Secretary Peter Tauber. He called out specific AfD politicians as being "complicit" in Lübcke's murder due to their rhetoric. He also argued that those who oppose Germany's constitution should have certain fundamental rights revoked, including the right to free assembly.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel also warned against using an aggressive tone in discussions, saying it could promote violence. Speaking with students in the town of Goslar, Merkel encouraged debate, but she added that people should be "respectful in their choice of language."
AfD enraged over remarks
The remarks from prominent CDU members sparked criticism among AfD leaders and supporters, who accused them of attempting to politicize Lübcke's death.
"It's Mrs. Kramp-Karrenbauer and Mr. Tauber who seem disinhibited," Alice Weidel, one of the party's parliamentary leaders, wrote on Twitter, saying they were "using a murder to discredit political rivals."
AfD co-leader Jörg Meuthen particularly condemned Tauber's comments, which were published in a guest column for the daily Die Welt, and called for him to be removed from his current post as a parliamentary deputy minister in the Defense Ministry.
"It is repulsive and evil as it is wrong," Meuthen told news agency DPA.
The AfD is the first far-right party to enter Germany's parliament since World War II and currently leads the opposition as the country's third-largest party. Several of senior AfD members have been criticized for their remarks on Germany's culture of remembrance of the Holocaust and grew their popularity with an anti-immigration platform.
Lübcke was found dead at his home on June 2 in what appeared to be an execution-style assassination. Authorities are currently investigating whether the suspect currently in custody acted alone.
If prosecutors find that his murder was politically motivated, it would be the first assassination of a sitting German politician since the 1970s.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland
Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team's defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch — but people would not want "someone like Boateng as a neighbor." He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: "We can't be blackmailed by children's eyes."
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alice Weidel
Alice Weidel generally plays the role of "voice of reason" for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians "pigs" and "puppets of the victorious powers in World War II." Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Frauke Petry
German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must "use firearms if necessary" to "prevent illegal border crossings." Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year — leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Marcus Pretzell
Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote, "These are Merkel's dead," shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Wendt
The member of parliament in Germany's eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland, again ...
During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be "disposed of" back to Anatolia. The German term, "entsorgen," raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
... and again
Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany's responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Author: Dagmar Breitenbach, Mark Hallam
rs/sms (AFP, dpa)
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