Germany's rightwing AfD wants to jettison postwar safeguards
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Version 0 of 1. Rightwing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) would unpick several postwar safeguards put in place to constrain the power of Germany’s national executive if it took power, the party’s draft manifesto suggests. The campaign programme was presented by the AfD’s co-leaders Frauke Petry and Jörg Meuthen at a press conference in Berlin. It demands that Germany should be able to revoke citizenship of “criminal migrants” who join terror groups or criminal gangs within 10 years of becoming German nationals, even if this renders them stateless – a move that would not only break with the German constitution but also international law. Denaturalisation was used as an instrument of repression against political enemies, including prominent figures such as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, during the Nazi era and in the GDR. In reaction to these abuses, West Germany banned denaturalisation into statelessness in its basic law in 1949 and later signed up to a UN resolution on the reduction of statelessness. The AfD’s draft manifesto further pledges to introduce a Swiss system of direct democracy, whereby citizens can propose plebiscites on changes to the constitution, and promises the German people “a vote along the British model on whether Germany should stay in the eurozone and, if need be, the EU”. Such a policy would also require changes to the German constitution, since referendums at national level can currently only be held on the issue of redrawing the borders of the country’s federal states. The German basic law also currently forbids government to call and set the terms of a referendum – something which would have to change if Germany were to follow “the British model”. Mechanisms of direct democracy were deliberately limited during the foundation of postwar Germany after Hitler had used a series of referendums in order to shore up power after 1933. The AfD’s draft manifesto states that “the introduction of the referendums after the Swiss model therefore have to be a non-negotiable part of any coalition negotiations”. AfD’s chances of taking part in coalition negotiations after the German federal elections on 24 September are extremely slim since the bigger centrist parties have ruled out coalitions with the populist party. AfD polled at up to 15% last September, but recent surveys put it at below 10% of the national vote. The fall in support has been fuelled by party infighting. AfD’s election platform also adopts a demand for “negative immigration” – an idea recently coined by Austria’s Freedom party. It proposes that the number of people allowed to enter Germany would be pegged below the number of people leaving: specifically, the draft suggests 200,000 more people would have to leave the country than arrive. Other AfD policies include a general ban on headscarves, the scrapping of inheritance tax and the rejection of rent controls. |