Voters boost extreme parties in east Germany

EAST GERMANS gave a strong boost to right-wing extremists and the former communists in two state elections, punishing the country’s biggest mainstream parties for the region’s high unemployment and cuts in social programmes.

Yet the results gave the fringe parties no share of power in Saxony or Brandenburg, where Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats retained control.

“This is a good result. I think it’s grounds for optimism. We have to keep working hard, and we will,” Schroeder said yesterday.

Secretary-general Laurenz Meyer of the conservative Christian Democrats, which lost heavily in both states, said the result was “a warning for Germany’s democratic parties.”

Franz Muentefering, head of the Social Democrats, called the 9.3% taken by the far-right National Democratic Party in Saxony - almost on par with his own party’s showing - a “disaster,” but insisted their political influence would remain small.

Paul Spiegel, leader of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, urged the mainstream parties to take the success of the National Democratic Party - known by their German initials NPD - “very seriously.”

“Certainly all those who voted Sunday for the NPD were not right radicals or anti Semites,” Spiegel said. “But it was also not only Nazis who helped bring the (Nazi party) to power in 1933.”

Average unemployment in east Germany has been stuck at about 20%, nearly twice the national average, and voter analysis showed that the extremist parties garnered much of their support from the jobless.

Despite the shift toward the political fringes, Sunday’s votes for new state parliaments left both regional governments intact.

In Brandenburg, the results gave Social Democrats and Christian Democrats enough support to continue a Social Democrat-led coalition for another five years. In Saxony, the Christian Democrats lost their majority but were poised to head an alliance with the pro-business Free Democrats. But the anti-immigrant National Democrats were jubilant after a populist campaign in Saxony that included broad attacks on Schroeder’s economic reforms.