NEO-NAZIS have hijacked weekly protest marches against Gerhard Schröder in eastern Germany as part of a campaign to disenfranchise the Left and gain advantage in regional elections.
The neo-Nazis, grouped under the banner of the National Party of Germany (NPD), have silently and subtly been registering their protest at anti-Schröder rallies, confident that in regional elections on Sunday they will soak up some of the swirling discontent that is sweeping the East.
German commentators are comparing the radicalisation of the East to the decline of the Weimar Republic, the inter-war government that was torn apart by feuding between Left and Right. Stephan-Andreas Casdorff, Editor of the Berlin Tagess-piegel, said: “The situation has to be watched carefully.”
Rallies in protest at the Chancellor’s labour market reforms, which are taking place across eastern Germany, are led by the communist Party of Democratic Socialists (PDS).
This week’s rally in Leipzig began like earlier marches with prayers for peace and social solidarity in the Nikolai Church, once the focal point for dissenters against the former East German communist regime. Then came a march through the city to the opera house, where a woman belted out the Bob Dylan classic, Blowin’ in the Wind.
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This time, however, the crowd barely heard the “Schröder must go!” speeches. On its fringes, a group of neo-Nazis — biceps like dock workers, spreading beer paunches, faces drained of expression — held aloft a black banner. The wording seemed harmless enough — “PDS catch your rats somewhere else” — but it transformed the demonstration. A troop of PDS supporters, hard-faced young men in hooded sweatshirts, surrounded the neo-Nazis shouting: “Throw out the Nazi pigs!”
Both groups reached for their weapons: beer bottles and sharpened flagpoles. Police with riot gear started to mutter nervously into their radios. Then a third element in the crowd, middle-aged and surprisingly noisy, took up another chant: “No violence! No violence!”
As a result nobody listened to the speakers attempting to stoke up popular anger against Herr Schröder’s reforms. The neo-Nazis had effectively hijacked the demonstration — just as they are hijacking the protest movement as a whole.
It has been a similar story throughout the former East Germany. Sometimes neo- Nazis slip to the front of a march and lead the chanting — seemingly innocent slogans against capitalism, bankers and the Government that suddenly take on a nationalist tone: “Jobs for Germans!”
What is new, and striking, is the far Right’s discipline; there are fewer drunks and in Leipzig, at least, they were plainly being steered by tattooed men in parked cars. For the most part the neo-Nazis stayed silent, knowing that this would give them the tactical edge over the raucous leftwingers.
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The far Right is poised for a comeback in Germany and its supporters have rarely been so confident or so restrained. Opinion polls predict that the NPD — which has not been represented in a regional parliament since 1968 — will win 9 per cent of the vote in Saxony. In Brandenburg, which also goes to the polls on Sunday, the neo-Nazi German People’s Union (DVU) also looks poised to enter parliament.
But it is the NPD that is the more menacing. The DVU is financed by a Munich-based publisher who has plastered the state around Berlin with posters; few local people know its candidates and even if the party wins parliamentary seats on Sunday it will probably go the way of other far-right groupings that shrivelled as soon as the lack of managerial competence became obvious.
The NPD has built up a comprehensive infrastructure in Saxony, above all in Leipzig and Dresden. These are the richest cities in Saxony, which is also the richest of the eastern German states — it grew by more than 1 per cent last year, while other eastern German regions plunged into recession. It is, however, precisely the relative wealth that has made it a breeding ground for the far Right: the glaring gap between rich and poor is stirring anger in the East.
Herr Schröder told the eastern Germans — and, in particular, the Saxons, who have been actively attracting foreign investors from car-makers to microchip manufacturers — that voting for the far Right would scare away foreign money.
The Saxons have heard these arguments before, but this time seem unimpressed. The NPD scored up to 8 per cent of the votes in half a dozen eastern German constituencies during the European elections. Municipal elections, also held in June, sent NPD councillors to five city halls. Some of them won more than 20 per cent of the vote.
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The Government arguments — that the East should be on its best behaviour — have been turned on their heads by the NPD. “German corporate investment must go to Germany first, and we must repatriate German industrial production,” Johannes Müller, a doctor who looks set to win a seat on behalf of the neo-Nazis on Sunday, said. The far-right case is strangely similar to that of the far Left: globalisation is a threat and a strong State has to fight back.
The battlelines in Germany are thus not between Left and Right, but between a political class that wants to modernise and trust the market, and those who feel that they have lost their political home.
President Köhler, the head of state-designate, provoked controversy this week when he suggested that east Germans should be more realistic and more flexible — in the long term, they cannot assume that subsidies will create equal wealth between East and West, he said.
The Monday protest rallies bubbled over with rage at the President — a largely non- political figure in Germany — and at the political establishment. Many in the East are now ready to vote for extremist parties, on the Left and the Right, to teach the political class a lesson.