\n Jewish community leaders in Germany voiced fears Monday over a surge in support for the far-right AfD in a regional election Thuringia state, just weeks after an anti-Semitic attack.\n<\/p>\n
\n Led by one of its most radical figures, Bjoern Hoecke, the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim Alternative for Germany party doubled its score from the previous election in 2014 to 23.4 percent in the ex-communist region, knocking Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU party off second spot.\n<\/p>\n
\n Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor who heads Munich's Jewish community, said the fact that the party was able to garner such a strong score, shows \"something fundamental has gone off the rails in our political system\".\n<\/p>\n
\n She warned that \"the erosion of democratic culture is continuing\", saying that voters who picked the AfD have \"backed a party that has for years prepared the ground for exclusion and violence of the far-right\".\n<\/p>\n
\n Christoph Heubner, deputy president of the International Auschwitz Committee, which represents survivors of the Nazi death camp, also voiced fears over the trend.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"For survivors of German concentration camps, this strong increase in votes for the AfD is a new terrifying sign that raises fear of a further consolidation of right-wing extremist trends and attitudes in Germany,\" he said.\n<\/p>\n
\n The AfD's strong result came despite widespread criticism after an October 9 attack in the eastern city of Halle, where a suspected neo-Nazi gunman tried and failed to storm a synagogue and then shot dead two people outside.\n<\/p>\n
\n After the bloody attack, the commissioner for combatting anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, like many other critics, argued that the AfD had trafficked in incendiary anti-Jewish sentiment.\n<\/p>\n
\n The AfD's local leader in Thuringia, Hoecke, in particular had been heavily criticised over his radical speeches, and political figures had urged the far-right party's bosses to cut him loose.\n<\/p>\n
\n The 47-year-old had labelled Berlin's Holocaust memorial a \"monument of shame\" and called for a \"180-degree shift\" in Germany's culture of remembrance of the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jewish community leaders in Germany voiced fears Monday over a surge in support for the far-right AfD in a regional election Thuringia state, just weeks after an anti-Semitic attack. Led by one of its most radical figures, Bjoern Hoecke, the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim Alternative for Germany party doubled its score from the previous election in 2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-42737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n