Vice News
Germany — September 11, 2017

“Real Nazis” poised for a comeback, German foreign minister warns

(image: scary white AfD supporters holding signs and shouting)
(Caption) Supporters of the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party shout slogans during an election campaign rally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a top candidate of the Christian Democratic Union Party (CDU) for the upcoming general elections in Torgau, Germany, September 6, 2017. REUTERS/Reinhard Krause

Godwin’s Law states that the longer an argument goes on online, the more likely it is someone will accuse someone else of being a Nazi. A common extension holds that whoever makes that charge first will lose the argument.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel threw caution to the wind Monday when he slapped the label on his country’s ultra-nationalist party, Alternative for Deutschland, or AfD. He added an extra adjective so there was no confusion, warning the public that “real Nazis” are poised to return to Germany’s parliament for the first time since Hitler’s defeat.

When it comes to “real Nazis,” Gabriel should know. His own father remained an unrepentant Nazi until the day he died in 2012.

Recent polls show the AfD is poised to win 8 percent to 11 percent of the vote in the Sept. 24 election, enough to make it the third-biggest group in parliament. Gabriel said the AfD is taking advantage of Germans’ unaddressed concerns about immigration, security, and jobs, especially in depressed eastern Germany.

“If we’re unlucky, then these people will send a signal of dissatisfaction that will have terrible consequences. Then we will have real Nazis in the German Reichstag for the first time since the end of World War Two,” Gabriel said in an interview with the internet provider t-online.de.

The AfD has attracted plenty of criticism for its vitriolic stance on race, religion and immigration, while also winning support from a vocal minority, especially after Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s controversial decision to throw open Germany’s doors to Syrian refugees in 2015.

On Monday Germany’s justice minister warned that several of the planks in AfD’s electoral manifesto appear to be outright illegal, such as the party’s promise to ban Muslim minarets if it wins power.

Meanwhile, the AfD’s top candidate, Alexander Gauland, is facing possible charges of incitement from the prosecutor’s office in the small central German city of Mühlhausen after Gauland told a campaign event there that German Integration Minister Aydan Özoguz needs to be “disposed of.”

While comparisons to Hitler’s party are rare in modern German politics, Gabriel has tip-toed up to that line before with regard to the AfD, telling the Funke Media Group in June: “Everything that they are saying, I’ve already heard — just to be clear — from my own father, who was a Nazi to his last breath.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives are leading in the polls with 37 percent. Gabriel’s own Social Democrats are second, with 22 percent.

— Greg Walters

Read more: (link) Germany is trying to get neo-Nazis out of its military