Chancellor Angela Merkel’s justice minister has accused the populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) of deliberately stirring up xenophobia in Germany – with potentially uncontrollable results.
Days after a home-made bomb was detonated before a mosque in Dresden, and a pig’s head was dumped before a mosque in Potsdam, Heiko Maas said the AfD was “manipulating internet radicalisation for party political ends”.
Mr Maas said the AfD’s most common tactic was to spread racist remarks via social media, from which it distanced itself subsequently, claiming the comments had been misunderstood. “Pouring oil on the fire is clearly a principle with the AfD,” he said.
On Saturday evening police were called to the Al-Farouk mosque in Potsdam, near Berlin, and discovered on the pavement the bloody head of a pig – considered an unclean animal by Muslims.
Days earlier the mosque made headlines because overcrowding, due to the refugee crisis, saw some congregation members praying on the pavement where the pig’s head was later found.
“It looks as if Islam has conquered Potsdam but there are just 1,000 Muslims among the 170,000 population,” said Imam Kama Abdallah, who has been negotiating with the city to find larger premises.
Days before the pig’s head appeared, AfD officials had distributed pamphlets near the mosque reading “Islam doesn’t belong in Germany”.
Local Social Democrat MP Klara Geywitz accused the AfD of “poisoning” the mood in Potsdam and said the pig head attack “recalled Germany’s darkest times”.
The AfD has rejected that claim, even as it battles a permanent series of scandals across the country.
In Berlin, AfD leaders distanced themselves from a man, days after he was elected as a party MP in the city-state parliament, who called refugees “disgusting worms” and homosexuals a “degenerate species”.
Last week the AfD in Bavaria posted a news report about a Turkish man suspected of raping a woman, beneath which a follower posted a one-word reply: “Hang”.
In January, AfD leader Frauke Petry suggested shooting migrants who crossed Germany’s borders illegally, then later claimed her remarks had been taken out of context.
Three weeks ago she suggested rehabilitating the term “völkisch”, originating in Germany’s 19th century chauvinist-nationalist movement and an inspiration to Adolf Hitler.
Ms Petry said she didn’t use the word “völkisch” herself but said it was “unacceptable” to dismiss the word as racist. “We need to work on giving the concept positive connotations,” she said in an interview.
Germany’s leading Duden dictionary links “völkisch” directly to the Nazis, “concerning a people as a purported race; of or belonging to a people as a purported race”. The term’s secondary Duden definition is an “obsolete” term referring to “national”.
Satirist Jan Böhmermann suggested the AfD rehabilitate other Nazi terms, such as “racial defilement” or “popular parasite”.
