Stora tråden om AfD

Tysklands regering räknar med att i slutet av 2020 ha spenderat totalt 93,6 miljarder euro för att täcka kostnader knutna till flyktingkrisen. Det motsvarar 873 miljarder kronor.

Beräkningarna är gjorda utifrån prognosen att 600.000 flyktingar ska komma till Tyskland i år, 400.000 nästa år och 300.000 årligen därefter.

Man räknar med att 55 procent av dem som får asyl kommer att ha jobb inom fem år.

Speaking with the "Bild am Sonntag" newspaper, Frauke Petry warned that Muslim immigration to Germany was threatening everything Europe had accomplished over the last two centuries.

"We can see that the significant achievements of the Enlightenment are in danger, as long as we continue to pursue this path of unregulated migration connected to promoting the importance of a religious radicalism," Petry told the paper.

She went on to accuse Muslims of wishing to implement Sharia law. "When more than half of Muslims, when in doubt, would give Sharia precedence over relevant national laws," then "something we can no longer control" will be at work in the country, Petry said.

Berlin (dpa) - Eklat zwischen dem Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland und der islamkritischen AfD: Die AfD-Vorsitzende Frauke Petry und zwei Parteifreunde haben schon nach knapp einer Stunde ein Treffen in einem Berliner Hotel abgebrochen.

Petry sagte, die Vertreter des Zentralrats (ZMD) hätten die Alternative für Deutschland in die Nähe des Dritten Reichs gerückt. Das sei inakzeptabel. Deshalb habe man das Gespräch beendet.
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Die Vorsitzende der Alternative für Deutschland sagte: "Man hat von uns verlangt, ein demokratisch beschlossenes Parteiprogramm zurückzunehmen." Die AfD hatte Anfang Mai ein Programm verabschiedet, in dem es heißt, "der Islam gehört nicht zu Deutschland". Daraufhin hatte der ZMD-Vorsitzende erklärt, zum ersten Mal seit dem Ende der Nazi-Herrschaft gebe es in Deutschland eine Partei, "die erneut eine ganze Religionsgemeinschaft diskreditiert und sie existenziell bedroht".

4 September: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Germany), state election
11 September: Lower Saxony (Germany), Municipal elections
18 September: Berlin (Germany), state election

Right-wing populists Alternative for Germany (AfD) have not had long to celebrate their recent electoral success in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, and already the party has been dealt a major blow. On Tuesday, the state's parliamentary leader and 12 other members of the 23-member group stepped down after failing to oust a fellow lawmaker accused of downplaying the significance of the Holocaust.

Only founded in 2013 as a protest party focusing mainly on financial neoliberalism, the AfD has seen its polling numbers rise significantly since pivoting towards anti-migrant rhetoric in the wake of Europe's refugee crisis. Riding this wave of relevance, the AfD garnered 15.1 percent of the vote when Baden-Württemberg held regional elections in March.

One of the newly minted AfD lawmakers in Stuttgart was Wolfgang Gedeon, a former doctor who quickly came under fire for several anti-Semitic remarks in writings he had published years earlier. One statement he made was to criticize the creation of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in central Berlin, saying "certain crimes" were being given too much attention.

His three-volume, 600-page opus on Christian culture in the West was subtitled "the challenges presented to Europe by secularism, Zionism and Islam." He further wrote that while Judaism was the "domestic enemy" of the Christian West, equal suspicion should be placed on the "external enemy," Islam.

Wolfgang Gedeon, a former doctor and lawmaker in Baden-Württemberg, announced after meeting with AfD leader Frauke Petry late Tuesday that for "party reasons" he was compelled to resign from the state parliamentary group.

The decision to become an independent in the local parliament was taken not only to avert a schism in the local parliamentary group, but "a split in the entire party that has kept it preoccupied for months," Gedeon said.

En djup konflikt har brutit ut i partiledningen för det tyska högerpopulistiska partiet AfD, Alternativ för Tyskland. I botten finns avslöjanden om antisemitiska åsikter hos en av partiets representanter som nu tvingats avgå. Men hanteringen av frågan har nu lett till en maktkamp mellan partiets två ledare.