Germany saw a shift to the right in the European elections with the Alternative for Deutschland party increasing its number of seats while Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and their coalition partner, the Green party, reported significant losses. Natalie Carney reports.
#afd #eu #election #germany #eu
#afd #eu #election #germany #eu
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00:00Germany has the highest number of seats in the European Parliament with 96.
00:05The country's far-right alternative for Deutschland or AFD now occupies 15 of them,
00:11having brought in just shy of 16% of the German votes.
00:15However, just days before the election,
00:17the party was kicked out of a far-right coalition of parties in the European Parliament
00:22because of statements made by its members that were considered outside acceptable political discourse.
00:28The party has been plagued with accusations of fascism and blatant racism,
00:33along with corruption and even spying for foreign countries.
00:37Yet, that does not appear to have hurt them much.
00:40Frustrated with the German government and EU politics,
00:4360-year-old Monika Trödler in the western German state of Rheinland-Pfalz gave her vote to the AFD.
00:52What we have now isn't a democracy.
00:55Countries no longer have anything to decide for themselves.
00:58Everything is decided from above in Brussels.
01:01I want to be able to have a say as a citizen.
01:04I want to be asked about important decisions.
01:09She believes in the AFD, which prioritizes ethnic Germans
01:13and claims it can win her country's self-determination back.
01:17Distance from Brussels and an anti-migration stance
01:20have proven to be the strongest rallying points for most of the far-right groups across Europe.
01:25The AFD criticized former German Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision
01:30to open the borders to more than one million refugees and economic migrants in 2016.
01:36But that backlash is seen as helping the party enter the federal government for the first time a year later.
01:42The COVID-19 pandemic also provided far-right parties with the opportunity to capitalize
01:48on the people's dismay of how the government was handling the crisis.
01:52Unilaterally implemented lockdown measures and mandatory vaccinations
01:56made many question the country's democracy,
01:59while the ruling coalition government's energy and climate policies
02:03have also been sharply criticized by the right.
02:06The AFD goes further, claiming the policies of Germany's three-party ruling coalition
02:11are not only failing, but a threat to the country's peace and prosperity.
02:16Politicians should be problem solvers.
02:19But here we are now represented by troublemakers.
02:23That means they create the problem and they enforce the problem
02:27and therefore I'm fighting, I'm fighting for our kids, for our people here.
02:32Even if they don't like me, I'm fighting for them.
02:34Yet political theorists say that's exactly what the far-right want people to believe.
02:39They see themselves in a greater conspiracy and Germany is one orchestra of that.
02:44You have to differentiate the complexity of the social world between enemy and foe
02:49to get homogeneity, to get straight categories, to get order.
02:53And this is something they need in their mindset
02:56and which is very attractive to a lot of people
02:59who are afraid of freedom and pluralism and something like that.
03:02Still, the AFD remains the largest opposition party in Germany
03:06and continues to win powerful positions at both the state and EU level.
03:11We will not continue as we did in the mass migration and not in the Green Deal.
03:17However, exactly how much weight the AFD and other Euro-skeptic nationalist parties
03:23will wield in Brussels will depend on their ability to work together.
03:28Natalie Carney, CGTN, Munich, Germany.