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Habeck: AfD is “poison for Germany as a business location”
Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck admits that the traffic light is partly responsible for the rise of the AfD. photo
© Kay Nietfeld/dpa
What would the plans of radical right-wingers mean in reality? The Vice Chancellor ventures a prediction. But he also sees the traffic lights as having shared responsibility for the rise of the AfD.
Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck has the AfD described as “poison for Germany as a business location”. In an interview with Welt TV, the Green Party politician said: “If you take these crazy fascist plans that they have expressed seriously – i.e. to expel all people who are not German according to their definition – then you can leave the restaurants “From the trades to the shipping companies, we’ll figure out what that means. Then the location is dead.”
The background to the statement is a meeting of right-wing extremists on November 25th in Potsdam, which the media company Correctiv reported on. Some AfD politicians as well as individual members of the CDU and the very conservative Values Union also took part in the meeting. According to participants, plans were discussed as to how a large number of people of foreign origin should leave the country – even under duress. The speaker included the former head of the right-wing extremist Identitarian movement in Austria, Martin Sellner. After the revelation, hundreds of thousands of people across the country demonstrated against right-wing extremism in recent days, some with sharp criticism of the AfD.
The Vice Chancellor admitted that the traffic light was partly responsible for the rise of the AfD. The principle of right-wing populism and right-wing radicalism is to always want to demonstrate “that a democratic society is not able to solve the big problems and then say: Then it has to go.” Habeck added: “You have to self-critically admit: The government argued too much, it took too long, and the solutions we found didn’t last long enough in the past. That’s certainly part of the reason Discontent that has spread in the country. And I am part of the government.”