Far-right candidate’s election to German county raises concerns

Sonneberg (Germany), July 8

Mike Knoth is more than thrilled that a far-right populist party’s candidate recently won the county administration in his hometown in rural eastern Germany for the first time since the Nazi era.

The gardener despises the country’s established parties, he doesn’t trust the media and he feels there are too many migrants in the country.

The far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, he hopes, will improve everything that’s not going well in his eyes in Sonneberg, which is in the southeastern state of Thuringia.

“I think the fact that so many people voted for Alternative for Germany has already given it legitimacy,” Knoth, 50, said during an interview. But some in Sonneberg haven’t been won over by AfD’s nationalist and antidemocratic rhetoric.

Margret Sturm, an optometrist whose family has been selling glasses for almost 60 years in Sonneberg, voiced her concern over AfD’s victory in an interview with a public television station.

“I told them that I don’t think it’s good to vote for the AfD. And whoever votes for the AfD must know that they have the Nazis in tow,” Sturm said in an interview at her store.

Sturm can barely fathom what happened after the interview was aired last week.

“We got hate mail, threatening phone calls, every minute. We were insulted by people we don’t even know, who don’t know us, who don’t know the business.” The threats were so relentless that Sturm’s husband installed surveillance cameras inside the store. But Sturm, 60, said she won’t let anybody silence her.

“People here are afraid to take a stand against the AfD and that makes us even more worried than anything else,” she said. AP