CONCEPT - FAR RIGHT IN GERMANY

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 CONCEPT - FAR RIGHT IN GERMANY

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• Hitler's Germany: The rise of the Nazis in 1930s was in response to the economic crisis created after the reparations Germany was forced to pay after the first World War. That led to a far-right ideology sweeping Germany, the militarisation of the nation, and the devastating Holocaust (extermination of Jews), and the final defeat of Germany in second World War. Germany has been extremely sensitive to any far-right ideology after that, carrying the burden of the dark age of Nazis.
• Far Right post Nazis: The dissolution of the Nazi Party in 1945 led to "Denazification" from 1945–1951 by the Allied forces of World War II, with an attempt of eliminating Nazism. However, various far-right parties emerged post-war, with varying success. Most parties only lasted a few years before either dissolving or being banned. Explicitly far-right parties have never gained seats in the Bundestag (Germany's federal parliament) post-WWII. The closest was the hard-right Deutsche Rechtspartei (German Right Party), which attracted former Nazis and won five seats in the 1949 West German federal election and held these seats for four years, before losing them in the 1953 West German federal election. This was until the election of Alternative for Germany (AfD) representatives to the Bundestag in 2017, however its status as a far-right party is disputed, with some placing it as simply right-wing.
• Rise of the AfD: The action by the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in the eastern German state of Thuringia in Feb 2020, where the party voted with two centrist parties, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Free Democrats, to help oust the state's left-wing prime minister—shattered traditional parties' long-standing refusal to cooperate with the far right, either formally or informally. The AfD's existence has a basis in political crisis: It was founded in 2013 in response to Germany's handling of the Euro crisis, and gained political prominence in the wake of the influx of more than a million refugees into Germany in 2015 and 2016. It has a disproprtionate strength in eastern Germany. After winning 23.5% of the vote in Thuringia as well as 27.5% in Saxony and 23.5% in Brandenburg, AfD leaders declared themselves a "people's party" at the center of German politics. When a political party wins roughly a quarter of the votes, it's very difficult to ignore them or shut them out entirely.
1. AfD was founded in April 2013, and narrowly missed the 5% electoral threshold to sit in the Bundestag during the 2013 federal election. 
2. In 2014, it won seven seats in the European election as a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists. 
3. After securing representation in 14 of the 16 German state parliaments by October 2017, in the 2017 federal election the AfD became the third-largest party in Germany after winning 94 seats in the Bundestag. 
4. The party is chaired by Jörg Meuthen and Tino Chrupalla.
5. In 2017 the AfD also became the largest opposition party in the Bundestag.
6. Its ideology is about German nationalism, Right-wing populism, Euroscepticism, Anti-Islam, Anti-immigration, and Climate change denial.
• Nazis rose in Thuringia first: This occurred in Thuringia, the first state where the Nazi party gained its political foothold in 1930. It is also the state where the AfD is led by the party's most notorious far-right figure, Björn Höcke. Angela Merkel called it "a bad day for democracy" and said the decision was "unforgivable." The Thuringia debacle is proof that populist far-right parties need not sit in government to have a major impact on the political debate. The AfD won only 12.6% of the vote nationwide in Germany's last federal elections in 2017, yet its influence on the political discussion here outpaces the vote share. AfD, and parties like it across Europe, is adept at exploiting existing political tensions to create outright political chaos.
• Repercussions: In response to criticism of her handling of the situation and inability to control her state-level CDU colleagues, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Merkel's self-anointed successor and head of the party, resigned her post. The direction of her party, and therefore the country, now depends greatly on who succeeds her. It also threatens the stability of the current national government under Merkel, a cooperation between the CDU and the center-left Social Democrats. 
• The threat to Europe: Populist far-right parties have now gained a foothold in politics across Europe, both domestically and internationally: In some countries, like Hungary and Poland, they control governments outright and have sought to undermine and dismantle democratic institutions like the media and an independent judiciary. In others, including Austria and Italy, they have served as junior governing partners, taking over key positions like the interior ministry to push their anti-refugee policies.
• German political under-currents: The AfD has played on several well-known undercurrents in German politics at the moment: That their actions in a country extra-sensitive to the far right would bring a wave of outrage and headlines; that their strength in the East has made it exceptionally difficult to build stable governments while still refusing to work with them. 
• Angela Merkel, Chancellor: Angela Dorothea Merkel is serving as the chancellor of Germany since 2005, and was the leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) from 2000 to 2018. She was widely described as the de facto leader of the European Union.
1. Following the 2005 federal election, Merkel was appointed Germany's first female chancellor at the head of a grand coalition consisting of the CDU, its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). 
2. After the 2017 federal election the CDU was again the largest party; she was reelected to her fourth term on 14 March 2018. In 2007, Merkel was President of the European Council and played a central role in the negotiation of the Treaty of Lisbon and the Berlin Declaration. 
3. One of Merkel's consistent priorities has been to strengthen transatlantic economic relations. Merkel played a crucial role in managing the financial crisis at the European and international level, and she has been referred to as "the decider". 
4. In October 2018, Merkel announced that she would not seek reelection as leader of the CDU at the party convention in December 2018 and as chancellor in 2021.
• Far right terror attacks in Germany: The German domestic intelligence agency estimated that the number of violent crimes with far-right elements rose by 3 percent in 2018, although attacks on centres for asylum seekers fell after a spike in 2015 and 2016. 
1. February 20, 2020: A 43-year-old gunman Tobias Rathjen kills at least nine people in a shooting rampage in Hanau, a town near Frankfurt. The gunman is suspected to have had far-right views. After a huge manhunt, his body was found next to his mother's. This deadly terrorist shooting in the German town of Hanau represents the latest in a string of far-right attacks and plots in what has long been considered one of Europe’s most stable countries.
2. January 2020: A dozen German men were arrested for allegedly plotting armed attacks on mosques around Germany. Their extraordinary suspected goal was to kill Muslims in “commando” style attacks with the explicit intention of provoking revenge, and even civil war. Each member was expected to contribute €50,000 to fund the operation. Part of the inspiration was global: German prosecutors say the plotters were influenced by the violent attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which a gunman killed 51 people, streaming some of it live on Facebook.
3. January 2020: January 2020: Germany banned the neo-Nazi group Combat 18, founded in Britain in the early 1990s as a militant wing of the British National party. The organisation had found a new life in a country that, on the whole, remains particularly sensitive about its fascist past.
4. October 9, 2019: A gunman who denounced Jews opens fire outside a German synagogue in the eastern city of Halle on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, killing two people as he live streams his attack. The attacker, a 27-year-old German, fatally shoots a woman outside the synagogue and a man inside a nearby kebab shop.
5. June 2, 2019: Pro-immigration German politician Walter Luebcke is found lying in a pool of blood outside his home in the state of Hesse. Stephan Ernst, a German far-right sympathiser initially confesses to the crime and later retracts his confession. Luebcke was hated by the far right because he defended Chancellor Angela Merkel's 2015 decision to accept refugees.
6. June 2019: In June 2019, it emerged that a group of rightwing extremists called Nordkreuz (Northern Cross) had used police data to compile a “death list” of leftwing and pro-refugee targets. Some of the 30 or so group members had security links, with at least one still employed in a special commando unit. The group had ordered body bags and quicklime to dispose of their potential victims, but despite the plot, Nordkreuz was not even noted as a threat by the BfV, the country’s domestic intelligence agency, in its annual report.
7. July 11, 2018: A member of a German neo-Nazi gang is jailed for life for her part in the murders of 10 people during a campaign of racially-motivated violence. Beate Zschaepe was part of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), whose members killed eight Turks, a Greek man and a German policewoman from 2000 to 2007. An official report later says police had "massively underestimated" the risk of far-right violence and that missteps had allowed the cell to go undetected.
• States of Germany: The Federal Republic of Germany is a federal republic consisting of sixteen partly-sovereign states (German: Land, plural Länder). The German nation state has a federal constitution, and the constituent states retain a measure of sovereignty. Berlin and Hamburg are frequently called Stadtstaaten (“City-states”), as is the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, and the remaining 13 states are called Flächenländer (literally "Area states").
1. Creation of the Federal Republic of Germany (“West Germany”) in 1949 was through the unification of the western states (which were previously under American, British, and French administration) created in the aftermath of World War II. 
2. Federalism is one of the entrenched constitutional principles of Germany. According to the German constitution (Basic Law, or Grundgesetz), some topics, such as foreign affairs and defence, are the exclusive responsibility of the federation (i.e., the federal level).
• History of the Three Reichs: 
1. The First Reich (Empire) was started by King Charlemagne who became the first Holy Roman Emperor in 800 AD, and it lasted until 1806, the time of the Napoleonic Wars.
2. The Second Reich started with a treaty in 1871 in Versailles. The biggest state in the new German Empire was Prussia. The rulers were called Kaisers or "German Emperors" and went on for 50 years.
3. The Third Reich was Nazi Germany; it lasted 12 years, from 1933 to 1945. It started after Adolf Hitler became the head of government. On 23 March 1933, the Reichstag (parliament) passed the Enabling Act, which let Hitler's government command the country without help from the Reichstag and the presidency. This gave him total control of the country and the government. Hitler, in effect, became a dictator. He shot himself dead when the Red Army approached Berlin.

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