Germany: Left-wing politician car-bombed as attacks on refugees rise

Die Linke councillor and refugee activist, Michael Richter

Just after midnight on Monday 27 July, a bomb exploded in the car of left-wing politician and refugee activist, Michael Richter, in the town of Freital, on the outskirts of Dresden in eastern Germany.

Richter, a 39-year old town councillor for the socialist party Die Linke (“The Left”) was not in the car at the time, and fortunately noone was harmed by the blast, which damaged a nearby car.

While police are yet to assign blame, Richter is certain that the attack came from right-wing groups in the area, who have threatened him repeatedly in recent months over his campaigning work for refugees.

"I am one of the faces in Freital who say we are for asylum, and I think that's the reason for the attack," Richter said after the blast.

"Threats have now become reality. They are trying to scare me, but I will not give up,"

Germany has seen a steady rise in violence against asylum seekers in the past year, with the German Federal Ministry of the Interior recording 202 attacks in the first six months of 2015 alone, compared to 162 in all of 2014 and 58 in 2013.

Germany: anti-Islamic PEGIDA rally draws 25,000 but is outnumbered by counter-protests

PEGIDA protesters in Dresden

Since October last year, Germany has become increasingly polarised, as weekly marches by a new right-wing movement opposed to a perceived “Islamisation” of Europe continue to grow by their thousands – a growth now matched by counter-protests nationwide.

The organisation – PEGIDA (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes or “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident”) – was founded in October after an anti-Islam march in Dresden organised by 41-year-old Lutz Bachmann through Facebook.

While the first march only attracted three hundred supporters, PEGIDA has held rallies in Dresden every Monday since, with numbers swelling to 18,000 on January 5. On January 12, in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France, they reached a record 25,000.

The regularity of the protests is a conscious appropriation of the “Monday demonstrations” of the pro-democracy movement in the former East Germany in 1989, which also grew rapidly and eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the East German government.

As well as attracting a variety of conservative and islamophobic elements of German society, PEGIDA also operates as an umbrella for a number of right-wing groups, including the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), as well as other neo-Nazi groups and right-wing football hooligans.

While PEGIDA claims not to be racist or right wing, Ralf Jäger, SPD interior minister for North Rhine-Westphalia, has dubbed the protesters “neo-Nazis in pinstripes", and the protests are widely viewed as thinly-concealed expressions of blatant xenophobia.

Germany: Spies target left-wing party

Germany’s domestic spy agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), has been exposed for spying on left-wing MPs.

German magazine Der Spiegel said on January 23 that the BfV spied on MPs from Germany's biggest left-wing party, the socialist Die Linke ("The Left").

Der Spiegel said the intelligence agency had 27 of Die Linke's members in the Bundestag - more than one third of its federal MPs - and a further 11 members of state parliaments, under surveillance, costing 390,000 euros a year.

The BfV spends about 590,000 euros a year on surveillance of the neo-Nazi German National Party (NPD), linked to violent racist terror groups.

Unlike the marginal NPD, Die Linke is Germany's fifth largest party, with representation in almost every state parliament and in the national Bundestag.

The individuals being spied on weren't "fringe" members either, but leading party members and MPs ― many are in the party’s “moderate” wing.

State election defeat humiliates Merkel

Elections in the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on September 4 have handed the conservative government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel another humiliating defeat. 

Merkel's centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) had already suffered five election defeats this year, in Hamburg, Sachsen-Anhalt, Rheinland-Pfalz, Bremen and the highly embarrassing loss of the wealthy conservative southern state of Baden-Württemberg – held by the CDU for sixty years – to the Greens.

The Mecklenburg-Vorpommern defeat was particularly galling for Merkel – who was born in Hamburg and raised in Brandenburg in the former East Germany – because the state includes her own electoral constituency.

On polling day, the CDU could only muster 23.1 percent of the vote, down by more than 5.7 percent since 2006 and its worst result in the state since German unification in 1990.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) were the clear victors, with 35.7 percent of the vote, an increase of 5.5 percent.

The socialist Die Linke ("The Left") – campaigning on a platform of social justice, democratic rights and action on the environment – won 18.4 percent of the vote.

Germany: State election weakens Merkel

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) survived a narrow vote in elections for the eastern state of Sachsen-Anhalt. 

The right-wing CDU lost 3% of the vote from the previous elections, dropping to 32.6% support. The two other big parties in the state, the far left Die Linke and the centrist Social Democrats (SPD), remained steady on 23.8% and 21.5% respectively.

Merkel’s allies at a federal level - the pro-free market Free Democrats - failed to cross the 5% threshold needed to win a seat, as did the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD). 

The lead NPD candidate Matthias Heyder is under investigation for discussing terrorist methods and bomb-making techniques on an online forum. Right-wing and racist violence nearly doubled in Sachsen-Anhalt in 2010.

Germany: Left makes big gains in poll

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, from the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), was returned to power in the September 27 federal elections. But the vote was marked by a record low voter turnout and a significantly increased vote for the far-left party, Die Linke ("The Left"). 

The election was a clear success for the CDU. Merkel's preferred coalition partners - the free-market fundamentalist Free Democratic Party (FDP) - increased its support by 4.8 points to an all-time high of 14.6%. 

This was enough to form a CDU-FDP government.

The FDP will replace the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) as coalition partners in the government of Europe's largest economy.

The SPD's support collapsed by more 6 million votes. It dropped a huge 11.2% to only 23% – the SPD's worst result since World War II. An SPD leader said on election night: "We have been bombed back into the Weimar Republic."

However, although the result has been widely labelled a shift to the right, the actual outcome doesn't bear this out. The total vote for the centre-right parties rose by only 3.4%, while the vote for the far-right neo-Nazi NPD dropped to just over 1%. 

The vote for Die Linke was 11.9% - a 3.2% increase on the 2005 result by the joint electoral ticket of two left-wing groups that was the forerunner to Die Linke. Formed in 2007, Die Linke is Germany's newest party and stands for pro-people, anti-corporate policies. 

Die Linke is also the only party that opposed the occupation of Afghanistan and has committed to withdrawing all German troops.