AfD in Saxony-Anhalt: ‘Yes to weapons, but only for repatriation campaigns and internal security’
Ulrich Siegmund is now very close to becoming governor of the state, where an Israeli defence firm is in talks to build a production facility: ‘Let us not demonise the production of military equipment across the board, as we will naturally need the appropriate resources for future repatriation and deportation campaigns, not least with a view to internal security, our stability and national defence’
from our correspondent Gianluca Di Donfrancesco
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Key points
BERLIN – Yes to arms production, but only if they are needed for mass repatriation and domestic purposes. Ulrich Siegmund, the Alternative für Deutschland candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, is now very close to becoming the state’s governor, following last Sunday’s triumph.
Weapons for remigration
On Friday 11 September, he stated: ‘Our position is very clear. We do not demonise the production of military equipment across the board, as we will naturally need the appropriate resources for future repatriation and deportation campaigns, obviously also with a view to internal security, our stability and national defence,” he said at a press conference.
During the election campaign, he promised deportations ‘from the very first minute’, a sort of citizens’ watch to support the police, and separate classes for refugee children.
On Wednesday, Chancellor Friedrich Merz accused the AfD of seeking ‘ethnic cleansing, based on origin and skin colour’. This, Merz said, is what the term ‘remigration’ means. The xenophobic party reacted angrily, even threatening legal action.
The Thuringian leader of Alternative für Deutschland, Björn Höcke – a key figure in eastern Germany and within the party’s most extremist wing – stated the following regarding mass remigration in his 2018 interview book *Never Twice into the Same River* (*Nie zweimal in denselben Fluss*): ‘I fear that a policy of “well-measured cruelty” will be unavoidable.’ He also anticipated that, in the process, ‘unfortunately we will lose certain sections of the population who are too weak or unwilling to oppose the progressive Africanisation, Orientalisation and Islamisation’. Höcke has been convicted twice for using Nazi slogans. He described the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as a ‘monument to shame’ (‘We Germans are the only people in the world who have erected a monument to shame in the heart of our capital’).
