File photo shows right-wing supporters protest against foreigners after a German man was stabbed last weekend in Chemnitz, Germany. — Reuters photo
BERLIN: A tense truce within German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative camp shattered Thursday after her hardline interior minister defended protests marred by neo-Nazi violence and blasted migration as “the mother of all political problems”.
The latest shots across Merkel’s bow came just two months after the minister, Horst Seehofer, threatened to torpedo her ruling coalition over the explosive border issue.
An uneasy calm that had taken hold during the holidays imploded in late August when a 35-year-old German man was stabbed to death in the eastern city of Chemnitz.
Three asylum seekers – two Iraqis and a Syrian – are suspects in the murder.
Far-right groups and thousands of local citizens took to the streets in the days after the stabbing, making illegal Nazi salutes and a number of attacks on foreign-looking people.
As Germany’s top law enforcer, Seehofer had faced calls to condemn the ugly scenes of marauding mobs, who also assaulted reporters and police.
He reserved judgement until Thursday’s incendiary interview, in which he offered a spirited defence of the demonstrations, albeit while criticising disturbances of the peace.
“There is agitation and outrage among the public over this killing that I can understand,” Seehofer told the daily Rheinische Post.
“If I weren’t a minister, I would have hit the streets as a citizen – of course not with the radicals though.”
Seehofer insisted he had “zero tolerance for forces that seize on these developments to call for violence or to actually commit it, including against the police”.
“That is totally unacceptable, there is no grey zone,” he said.
However Seehofer, the most strident critic of Merkel’s liberal refugee policy within her coalition, expressed sympathy with the anger that fuelled the protests.
“The migration issue is the mother of all political problems in this country. I’ve been saying that for three years,” since Merkel opened Germany’s borders to more than one million asylum seekers as other EU countries shut the door to them.
The comments echoed remarks this week by Seehofer’s firebrand counterpart from Italy, Matteo Salvini, that Merkel had ‘underestimated’ the troubles mass immigration would bring. — AFP