They gathered as usual at Villa Adlon on Lake Lehnitz in Potsdam, southwest of Berlin. In this listed building, in neo-baroque style and transformed into a luxury hotel, the influential executives of the German far right (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) have no scruples, this Saturday, November 25, 2023, to sit at next to neo-Nazis to follow a conference devoted to ethnic cleansing.
The meeting was launched by a former dentist from Düsseldorf, Gernot Mörig, known for his activism in neo-Nazi circles. The guest is Martin Sellner, the representative in Austria of the French organization Génération Identitaire, who came to present the “model state” capable of deporting two million “non-assimilated German citizens” to North Africa.
Among the members of the AfD, we find Roland Hartwig, the advisor to the president of the party, Alice Weidel, but also Ulrich Siegmund, the head of the parliamentary group of the Saxony-Anhalt region. The place is very symbolic, located only a few kilometers from the villa Marlier which hosted, on January 20, 1942, the “Wannsee Conference” responsible for implementing the “final solution”. The speakers are clearly inspired by their mentors. Their project is strangely reminiscent of the “Madagascar plan” envisaged by the Nazis in 1940 which aimed to move four million European Jews to the former French colony.
Links between AfD and neo-Nazis
The revelations from the investigative site “Correctiv” acted like an electric shock on German civil society which until then seemed amorphous in the face of the rise of the far right. She has been on the street since the investigation was published. “She felt a threat,” notes Hans Vorländer, political scientist at the University of Dresden, and new president of the German federal government’s Expert Council on Integration and Migration.
“No one could ignore the links between the AfD and the neo-Nazis. But the frequency of these meetings in Potsdam is a new and worrying fact,” adds Gerd Mielke, political scientist at the University of Mainz. Among the participants, we also find the head of the AfD list for the next European elections, Maximilian Krah, or the ideological leader of the far right, the publisher Götz Kubitschek, but also conservatives wishing to cut the “sanitary cordon “, like the former head of German general intelligence (Verfassungsschutz), the Christian Democrat Hans-Goerg Massen (CDU) who is preparing to create his own party.
“The extreme right remains the greatest threat to our democracy,” insisted Nancy Faeser, Federal Minister of the Interior, during a parliamentary debate dedicated to the Potsdam meeting on January 18. An opportunity for the far right to once again reverse the roles: “Stop making a big deal out of this secret meeting. It’s you who doesn’t respect the law [en laissant entrer des migrants]. We are the real defenders of the rule of law, not you! […] The tide has turned in Germany and the AfD will triumph whether you like it or not,” replied Bernd Baumann, the secretary general of the parliamentary group.
In 2022, police dismantled the “Reichsbürger” network – some of whose members belong to the AfD – which aimed at a coup to restore the Empire to its 1871 borders. “This was not a fanciful project carried out by a few retirees nostalgic for the Empire but by people organized at the federal level with ramifications in the administration”, estimates Melanie Amann, investigative journalist at the magazine Der Spiegel. Currently on trial, several members are suspected of having planned an armed attack on Parliament, with the help of contacts in the Bundestag, the army and the administration.
36% voting intentions in the Land of Thuringia
The more radical it is, the more votes the AfD collects. As a result, she no longer hides her racist ideas. The spokesperson for the parliamentary group in the Federal Assembly (Bundestag), René Springer, publicly welcomed on his X account (formerly Twitter) the ethnic cleansing project discussed in Potsdam: “We are going to send foreigners back to their country by million. It’s not a secret plan. It’s a promise,” he said.
“You just have to listen to Björn Höcke, the strong man of the party, to be convinced of this,” adds Hans Vorländer. For years he has been preaching the “ethnic homogenization” of Europe on the podiums of Thuringia with rhetoric inspired by National Socialism. Despite this, its popularity continues to grow. Björn Höcke, president of the regional federation, could obtain, according to polls, 36% of the votes as head of the list in the September elections, almost twice as much as the conservatives of the CDU (20%). It is therefore no longer inconceivable to see Björn Höcke capture the absolute majority in terms of seats in his region. If the environmentalists and liberals of the FDP fail to pass the minimum threshold of 5% (a likely scenario), the AfD would only need 40%. Ironically, in 1930 the state of Thuringia was the first to be governed by the Nazis.
“There is a risk of political instability,” warns Hans Vorländer. And this prospect worries economic circles. What will be the impact on Germany’s reputation after the European elections and especially after the regional elections in the fall in three regions of the former GDR (Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg) which promises a tidal wave of the extreme right ? “The party is extremely dangerous economically,” repeats Siegfried Russwurm, president of the Federation of German Industries (BDI).
Particularly in the “new Länder” of the East where investors are injecting billions into new technologies such as the American Intel in Magdeburg which is going to build a 30 billion euro semiconductor factory in Magdeburg with 10 billion in subsidies public. This is the largest investment ever made by a foreign company in Germany. For the boss of the high-tech group Jenoptik, Stefan Traeger, who must hire foreign technicians in the coming years, a victory for the AfD in September could mean a challenge to the industrial site in Jena. To warn voters, its employees, most of whom already have an immigrant background, agreed to participate in an advertising campaign asking Thuringian voters to “stay open to the world!”
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