VRepresentatives of the Jewish community in Germany have expressed their dismay at the first AfD success in a district election in Germany. The “first election of an AfD candidate to an executive office shocks me,” said the President of the Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, the editorial network Germany. According to Schuster, not every AfD voter has right-wing extremist sentiments. “But the party whose candidate you chose is right-wing extremist according to the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution.”
He was deeply concerned that so many people had voted for the party. “This is a breach in the dam that the democratic political forces in this country cannot simply accept,” said the President of the Central Council.
Knobloch: The danger to the Jewish community has long been real
In the Thuringian town of Sonneberg, the AfD candidate Robert Stuhlmann, an AfD member of the state parliament, received 52.8 percent of the votes in the runoff election for the office of district administrator after counting all 69 voting districts. The CDU counter-candidate Jürgen Köpper came to 47.2 percent. According to the State Statistical Office, voter turnout was 59.6 percent. In the first round of the election, Stuhlmann had already achieved almost 47 percent of the votes. After that, the SPD, Greens and Left called for the election of the CDU candidate Köpper.
The International Auschwitz Committee spoke of a sad day “for the district of Sonneberg, for Germany and for democracy”. Executive Vice-President Christoph Heubner said that a majority of voters had apparently “taken leave of democracy and consciously opted for a right-wing extremist party of destruction dominated by a Nazi”. For survivors of the Holocaust, this raises “burning questions” with regard to Germany.
The President of the Jewish Community in Munich and Upper Bavaria, Charlotte Knobloch, said on Sunday evening that the danger to the Jewish community and other minorities had long been real ten years after the founding of the AfD and six years after the right-wing extremist party entered the Bundestag. With the first election of an AfD representative to the district administrator, the people “beat out another pillar of the stable democracy in Germany,” said the former president of the Central Council of Jews.
CDU district chairmen: broadside against federal CDU
According to Deutschlandfunk, representatives of the Turkish community in Germany were also concerned about the outcome of the district elections. The federal chairman of the Turkish community in Germany, Gökay Sofuoglu, said the danger was greater than some would realize. At the Turkish Federation, there was talk of a day X, the broadcaster reported on Monday.
After the election, many politicians also expressed concern about the success of the AfD and commented on possible reasons. Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil (SPD) also sees an east-west difference. “Especially when it comes to the key issues of current politics, there are different moods between East and West,” said Weil on Monday in the “Frühstart” program on RTL and ntv. The Thuringian AfD under its state and parliamentary group leader Björn Höcke is considered to be right-wing extremist. “I can’t make any sense of the fact that this has no resonance at all in the election results,” said Weil. In Lower Saxony he could not imagine such a result. The SPD politician is certain that the majority of AfD voters are not convinced of the party’s content, but rather disappointed by the other parties. “From this I conclude that the others have to get better,” emphasized Weil.
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