AfD Adopts Hardline Election Program; FDP Elects Kubicki
Germany's far-right AfD adopted hardline 'remigration' election programs for the September 20 state votes in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin. The Mecklenburg program was approved unanimously by 237 delegates, while in Berlin the party named Kristin Brinker its first-ever candidate for mayor. The same Saturday, a depleted FDP elected Wolfgang Kubicki federal chairman with 59 percent, defeating Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann's surprise floor bid -- all against German unemployment above three million, a 12-year high.
The German right spent the weekend sharpening its program for the autumn. At a congress in Grimmen, the AfD in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern unanimously adopted -- with 237 delegates -- an election program for the September 20 state vote that pairs a "border and return police," a deportation detention facility and the contested language of "remigration" with a return to nuclear power, an end to CO2 taxation and use of the Nord Stream pipelines. The party leads polls in the state at 36 percent.
In parallel, the AfD adopted a Berlin program in Brandenburg an der Havel and, for the first time, nominated a candidate for governing mayor: its state and parliamentary leader Kristin Brinker. The Berlin text blames the city's housing shortage on immigration -- citing a rise in residents with a migration background from 25 to 41 percent in a decade -- and demands an immediate asylum-intake stop, abolition of the state anti-discrimination law, a new "district police" and a "state office for immigration, asylum and remigration," alongside an education overhaul. The AfD polls 16 to 18 percent in Berlin, second behind the CDU, though it holds only the fifth-largest faction in the current parliament.
The liberals, meanwhile, tried to rebuild. At a congress in Berlin the Free Democrats elected Wolfgang Kubicki federal chairman with 390 of 649 votes, or 59 percent, turning back a surprise floor candidacy from Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, who took 259. Kubicki succeeds Christian Durr, who quit after the FDP lost all its Bundestag seats and suffered further electoral defeats.
The party manoeuvring unfolded against a darkening economy: German unemployment has passed three million, a 12-year high and a structural break for a country long accustomed to sub-5-percent joblessness, while the closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year has driven up energy costs and weighed on growth.