Germany’s far-right groups are on the march

Alternative for Germany (AfD) is the third-largest party in the Bundestag, gaining 12.6 per cent of the vote at last year’s election.

Its anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric is becoming ever more strident and the lines between it and other far-right organisations such as Pegida and the National Democratic Party (NPD) are blurring. The AfD’s parliamentary group leader, Alexander Gauland, 77, said last year that the country had the right “to be proud of the achievements of German soldiers in the two world wars”

The Reichsbürger or Reich Citizens are a growing worry to the authorities because many of them are armed and prepared to commit violence to further their aim of restoring Germany to the borders of the former Reich, which would include much of today’s Poland. There are about 18,000 of them…

The intelligence service estimates that the country has 24,000 right-wing extremists, 12,700 of them deemed violent.

Saxony is governed by a coalition of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democrats. A poll this week put the AfD second in the state at 25 per cent. The next state election is a year from now.