Right-wing party leader: No more Muslim immigrants to Germany!

© Reuters / Hannibal

A German right-wing politician said in an interview his country should halt immigration for Muslims and others who "are completely foreign to our cultural tradition." He says this is necessary to stop the creation of "parallel societies in Germany."

"We should no longer support immigration by people who are totally foreign to our cultural tradition, in fact we ought to block it," Alexander Gauland, a senior official with the Alternative for Germany (AFD) party, told the newspaper.

"There are cultural traditions that have a very hard time integrating here ... those cultural traditions are at home in the Middle East," Gauland, 73, said.

His comments came less than a week after it emerged that German's population had grown by 300,000 during 2014, largely due to immigration. This is the fourth year in a row that the German population has recorded growth.

Gauland also spoke of the danger of creating "parallel societies" developing in Germany, "which we won't be able to cope with in the end," reported.

The AFD party has seen an upsurge in support in recent months, and is ideologically close to the anti-Islamist movement PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West).

Gauland says the anti-immigration drive by PEGIDA is not racist, but rather, "a people's movement" that he believes is comparable with the early anti-nuclear demonstrations that helped to launch the Green party as a political force in Germany.

He was originally a member of the Christian Democrats Union (CDU), before quitting and helping to form the AFD in 2013. He says that Chancellor Angela Merkel's comments that "Islam belongs to Germany" could prove to be fatal for the CDU and the AFD is ready to pick up the disenfranchised voters.

"The chancellor's words were deadly for ordinary CDU members," Gauland said.

During Germany's national elections in 2013, the right-wing AFD narrowly failed to reach the 5 percent electoral threshold necessary to enter parliament, claiming 4.7 percent of the vote. But the party managed to win seven of Germany's 96 seats in the European Parliament during last year's European elections.

Chancellor Merkel has hit out at the anti-Islamist sentiment in German that has been stirred by the emergence of PEDIGA. She joined a rally in Berlin on January 13 to promote "religious tolerance" amid ongoing mass rallies against immigration policies and the growing "Islamization" of the West.

A rally held by PEDIGA in Dresden on January 12, attracted in the region of 25,000 protesters, who were complaining about excessive immigration in the city. However, less than three percent of the capital of Saxony's 100,000 population were born outside of Germany and just 0.1 percent of people from the city are Muslims, AP reported.

A poll carried out in November and commissioned by the Bertelsman Foundation think-tank said that 57 percent of non-Muslims surveyed thought that Islam threatened German society. In addition, 61 percent of respondents said that Islam did not fit into Western society. According to census data from previous years, Islam is the second largest religion in Germany after Christianity.

Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://bit.ly/1xcsdoI.