"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 Tagesspiegel 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.
#Vizepräsident der AfD: Gauland will Zuwanderung aus Nahost stoppen #AlexanderGauland... http://t.co/N4slh9vm8whttp://ift.tt/1Boenhf
— PEGIDA Trends (@Pegidizer) January 28, 2015
Gauland wants to stop immigration from the Middle East
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,” Tagesspiegel 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).
READ MORE: ‘Anti-Islamization’ & ‘pro-tolerance’ activists march in Berlin (VIDEO)
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.
READ MORE: ‘Islam is welcome here, but we want to keep our culture’ - PEGIDA to RT
“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.
No comments :
Post a Comment