By
our dpa-correspondent and Europe Online
Berlin (dpa) – The traditionally beer-fuelled political rallies
marking the beginning of Lent on Wednesday turned into a stand-off
between Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s centre-right affiliate party and
the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Horst Seehofer, a political heavyweight in Bavaria‘s Christian Social
Union (CSU), all but declared war on the AfD, which was launched on
an anti-euro platform two years ago and has openly stated its desire
to draw Bavarian voters away from the CSU.
“There will be no democratically legitimate party to the right of
[the CSU] in the long-term,” Seehofer said at a rally in Passau,
referencing critics‘ assessments that the AfD will fail to establish
itself as a sustainable force in mainstream politics.
Seehofer used the rally – where party leaders traditionally attack
each other with acerbic speeches – to position the CSU as the go-to
party for voters who are critical of immigration, a domain which the
AfD has campaigned on extensively.
“We are not the social welfare office for the entire world,” Seehofer
said in front of thousands of CSU members, adding that migrants from
Balkan states whose asylum bids are rejected by the German government
should immediately be deported.
Bernd Lucke, the head of the AfD, kicked off the speeches earlier in
the day in the Bavarian town of Osterhofen by poking fun at his
party‘s conservative stance on immigration.
“In Bavaria, I am a part of the immigration problem,” said Lucke,
whose party took its first parliamentary seats in a western German
state – Hamburg – this week after winning 6.1 per cent of the vote,
thereby clearing the 5-per-cent hurdle to enter the legislature.
The event marking the end of the pre-Lenten carnival season is at the
centre of a series of rallies held by Germany‘s mainstream political
parties.
Chancellor Angela Merkel used her Ash Wednesday speech to call for
less bureaucracy regarding the minimum wage, which was introduced at
the beginning of 2015.
“We are all for the minimum wage. But after Easter we must look at it
more closely: where is there too much bureaucracy?” she said at an
event in the east of the country, adding that the coalition
government would then act to reduce it.
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