Political parties from the far right made substantial gains in West German municipal elections on Sunday, calling up charges of anti-Semitism as well as xenophobia.
In Frankfurt and in municipal elections throughout the state of Hesse, voters veered away from the ruling Christian Democratic Union of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, registering votes instead for a neo-Nazi party.
The National Democratic Party, or NPD, garnered 6.6 percent of the popular vote in the Frankfurt municipal elections and will thus be represented in the city’s parliament.
The NPD’s election victory prompted the ecological, left-wing Green Party to accuse the CDU of staging an “anti-Semitic” campaign. It referred to a CDU advertisement which featured one of its leaders, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, also known as “Danny the Red,” trying to burst into the town hall violently.
“You should know to whom you are opening the door,” said the ad.
The CDU rejected the Greens’ accusation as ridiculous and noted that many of the Green’s activists have displayed anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish biases.
In the federal state of Hesse, the NPD also succeeded in mobilizing sizable popular support for its program of expelling foreigners from the country.
Sunday’s gain by the NPD in Frankfurt, Germany’s financial heart, fifth-largest city and home to West Germany’s second largest Jewish community, is similar to the dramatic success in Berlin of another neo-Nazi group, the Republicans, who the government described as extreme right rather than neo-Nazi.
At the end of January, the Republicans, headed by a former SS officer outspokenly proud of his Nazi past, received nearly 8 percent of the popular vote in West Berlin and thus gained 11 seats in the 128-seat local legislature.
Moreover, these two successive extreme right-wing gains come after still another neo-Nazi group, the German People’s Union, or DVU, won representation last year in the Bremen federal state’s parliament.
West German establishment parties have until now failed to come forward with an idea of how to stop the neo-Nazis’ gains.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
