German politician compares hard-right AfD to Nazis in dramatic parliamentary attack

The nationalist Alternative for Germany party (AfD) has been compared to the Nazis by a rival MP during turbulent sessions in parliament this week as it seeks to establish itself as the main opposition.

A former leader of the Green Party compared a recent AfD rally to a notorious 1943 speech by Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, in which he called for “total war”. 

In an emotionally charged speech to parliament, Cem Özdemir accused the AfD of seeking to impose Nazi-style press censorship and “despising everything modern Germany stands for”.

Mr Özdemir’s intervention came as the MPs from other parties rounded on the AfD after it tabled a motion calling on the government to censure a well-known journalist over satirical articles he wrote.

“The German parliament does not censor the press,” Mr Özdemir said. “In our country there is no compulsory worldview, of which you dream at night, We have freedom of the press.”

The German term he used for worldview, Gleichshaltung, is one that is specifically associated with the Nazi era.

“If you were honest, you would admit that you despise this country,” he went on. “You despise this House and the values of the Enlightenment. You despise everything for which this country is respected in the world.”

Mr Özdemir went on to attack the AfD over a political rally on Ash Wednesday earlier this month at which the crowd called for him to be deported from Germany because of his Turkish roots.

The MP, who was born in Germany to immigrant parents, said the rally reminded him of the Sportspalast speech of 1943 in which Goebbels asked a frenzied Berlin crowd: “Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even yet imagine?”

“Their raging mob wanted to deport me on Ash Wednesday. It’s easier than they think,” Mr Özdemir said, adding that he was returning to his home town in south-western Germany in a few days.

“That’s my home and I will not let you break it,” he said. “This Germany is stronger than your hate will ever be.”

The AfD attempt to censure Deniz Yücel, a German journalist released last week after being held without charge for over a year in Turkey, appeared to backfire. The party attacked the reporter over two satirical articles he wrote about the German Right before his arrest in Turkey. But Mr Yücel has become a cause celebre in Germany since his incarceration and even some of the AfD’s own MPs did not back the motion.

The AfD is set to become the main opposition party in parliament if Mrs Merkel’s new coalition goes ahead. But the party’s efforts to take advantage of its new prominence yielded mixed results this week as its MPs were forced to sit through a schooling on the basics of constitutional law by a 25-year-old MP.

Philipp Amthor, the youngest MP in Germany who is known as “Merkel’s little boy”, tore apart another of the party's motions calling for a blanket burka ban, explaining in excruciating detail that it was unconstitutional and would be struck down by the courts.

Mr Amthor, who himself backs a burka ban, said the government had gone as far as it could with a partial ban last year.