The AfD surge in Germany is good for Jews and Israel
he German right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) won an absolute majority in local elections for the first time ever. The government-funded German Jewish Council was appalled, but AfD is the most pro-Israel party in Germany. Op-ed.
A wave of outrage and disgust from around the world greeted the election of a modest lawyer named Robert Sesselmann to the provincial office of county commissioner in Sonneberg, Thuringia, a woodland province in Eastern Germany. The reactions must seem familiar to Israeli voters who support the Conservative government Netanyahu VI. You would think they elected Itamar Ben-Gvir as police minister.
The attention showered on an obscure by-election for the humble office of county commissioner in East Germany’s tiniest county is quite astounding. The real reason for the outburst, of course, is the nationwide upsurge in support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
The right-wing groundswell is caused by the disastrous policies of the Left-Green coalition, which has made Germany the “sick man of Europe”, the only country in Europe with a recession in full swing, spiraling energy prices and a “woke” government that wants to take away everyone’s cars, heating, energy and houses, let in millions more unskilled Muslim migrants, mutilate children sexually without parental consent and arrest parents if they protest.
In the most recent INSA/YouGov poll, the AfD is at 20.5% nationally, ahead of all three ruling parties and tied with the formerly conservative Christian Democrats CDU (if you subtract their Bavarian sister party CSU).
Next week, the AfD may be the most popular party in Germany – after 10 years of slander, media blackouts and persecution by the secret police, tax-funded NGOs and violent Black Flags “Antifa”.
In the East German states of Saxony (28%), Thuringia (28%) and Brandenburg (24%), scheduled to hold state elections 2024, the AfD is already in first place (or tied for first in Brandenburg).
If you ask West Germans why the right-wing party is so successful in their “Blue Bastion” of the former Communist East Germany, they will tell you – with typical West German arrogance – it is because East Germans are xenophobic rednecks, hopelessly stuck in the stone age.
If you ask East Germans like Robert Sesselmann, however, the answer is quite different: They will tell you the East Germans still remember what it is like living under a far-left Stasi dictatorship, and also remember how to fight it. The more the center-left parties attack the AfD, and use every trick in the book to cheat them out of electoral slots like in Saxony 2019, sending the secret political police after the AfD Youth and the Thuringian chapter, the more East Germans frown and say: “We’ve seen this all before.”
As I have written several times in articles posted on Arutz Sheva, the AfD prides itself on being the most pro-Israel party in the German Bundestag. Despite a blanket boycott on everything we do from the self-styled “democratic” parties, it is in the area of pro-Israel legislation that we have had some of our greatest successes – forcing the other parties to act with groundbreaking proposals that later became law.
In 2019, the AfD was the first to draft an anti-BDS law, and then a motion to ban Hezbollah, both were taken up by the rest of the Parliament, and both became law. That same year, I had the honor of visiting Judea and Samaria with a delegation of the Jews in the AfD and meeting with activists like original settler Daniella Weiss and Boaz Haetzni, which I wrote about and which were posted on Arutz Sheva,Israel National News. Just last month, I met with Samaria regional council head Yossi Dagan in Brussels, and promised we will continue to expose EU funding for anti-Israel NGOs together with our friends in the pro-Zionist Israeli groups and NGOs.
The AfD is the only party that calls the surge in Muslim anti-Semitic hate in Germany by its name. That is why the surge of voter support for the AfD, in the face of all the smears they have hurled at us, is good for Israel, and good for Jews in Germany.
When left-wing journalists want to smear the AfD as “far-right Holocaust deniers”, they routinely return to former party head Alexander Gauland’s disparaging dig at the Third Reich 2018, in which he called Hitler “a speck of bird s**” on German history – as if that were pro-Nazi.
They never give you the full quote, however, which is replete with the profound historical knowledge wise old Gauland was renowned for:
“Yes, We bear our responsibility for those 12 years (of the Third Reich). But Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird s*** on our over 1000-year history. … Dear friends, let us always remember it was a German Jew, Ernst Kantorowicz, who immortalized the fame of the Staufer emperor (Friedrich II.).
No, Islam is not a part of our heritage. Our ancestors stopped it at the Gates of Vienna in 1683. But from Ballin and Bleichröder to Rathenau and Kantorowicz, German Jewry was always part of our heroic German history – that Hitler wanted to destroy.”
They will never tell you that Gauland was actually exalting the glorious past of German Jewry as an integral part of German history when he gave that speech.
Funny, that. It’s almost as if they had no better argument.
* MEP Joachim Kuhs is a member of the Budget and Budget Control Committee of the European Parliament and Speaker of the Christians in the AfD. He is currently serving as Chair of the AfD Group in the European Parliament.
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