On the heels of the AfD’s historic electoral victory in Sonneberg last weekend, the head of the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution (LfV) in the east German state of Thuringia, who’s responsible for the state’s internal security services, has resorted to using dehumanizing language to describe AfD voters, effectively referring to all 16 million of them as fascist scum.
In remarks delivered in an interview with the public broadcaster NDR on Monday, June 26th—comments reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign event where she branded half of Americans as “deplorables”—Thuringian state spy chief Stephan Kramer characterized AfD supporters, which now make up one-fifth of the population, as the “brown dregs” of German society, Junge Freiheit reports.
The Federal Republic, he said, is presently composed of “about 20% brown dregs,” clearly referring to the latest national polling data which for some time now has revealed that AfD support stands between 19-20%.
Despite likening AfD voters to Hitler’s Brownshirts, however, Kramer told the broadcaster that he still believes there is hope to persuade them to vote in a way that he finds acceptable. Alluding to last weekend’s district election in Sonneberg, Thuringia, where AfD candidate Robert Sesselman easily defeated the incumbent CDU candidate with nearly 53% of the vote, Kramer said: “If you now see that 53% vote for the AfD, then there is still a margin … that you can still reach.”
The party’s members, however, “know what the party stands for,” he asserted before adding: “That is why they’re members, that’s why they’re right-wing extremists.”
Lastly, the Thuringian spy chief also warned of the possibility of those on the populist Right and the populist Left forming a united bloc, arguing that the ample ideological overlap between the camp of Die Linke (The Left) voters surrounding Sahra Wagenknect and AfD voters makes them natural allies.
It is “problematic that many actors in the political arena keep dismissing the possibility of the emergence of a cross-front between the far left and the far right as absurd theater and malicious propaganda,” Kramer said.
Thuringia’s AfD leader Björn Höcke, who was present in Sonneberg at Sesselmann’s victory over the weekend, promptly responded to Kramer’s remarks, slamming them in a post to social media. “Left-wing extremist Stephan Kramer, President of the so-called protection of the constitution of Thuringia, classifies 20% of the population as literally ‘brown dregs.’ An official who uses such language not only violates the rule of moderation but also dehumanizes,” he wrote.
