Death of a Neo-Nazi

There has been virtually no coverage of the upcoming Bundestagswahl in Germany by any of the American media. The general election is next weekend (September 18) and there are, I believe, at least two reasons why we here in the USA are hearing and reading gar nichts about it. The wall-to-wall coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath and the destruction of New Orleans have displaced almost everything else from radio and TV newscasts. This comes as no surprise and it is, after all, a huge story with both a massive human interest element and a considerable political one as well. The second reason I suspect is the generalized lack of interest in this country in “national” news from any other country. To be fair, we (the USA) are the sole remaining superpower and still the most potent global economic force on the planet, so what goes on internally here is of import and interest to the citizens of the rest of the world. But it is also true, in my opinion, that the overall interest in events taking place outside our borders that does not directly involve Americans (e.g. Iraq) is diminished here by a generalized American inward-lookingness and provincialism.

I wanted to bring to the attention of the Blog an amazing development in the Wahlkampf between Gerhard Schröder’s SPD and rival Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU. Pretty much from the get-go when Schröder deliberately lost a vote of no-confidence in the Bundestag and called for early elections, the conservative CDU/CSU alliance looked like a sure bet to win. They are still ahead in the polls with only eight days left in the campaign but their lead is dwindling somewhat and Schröder, in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, sounded confident that he could yet pull off a come-from-behind victory. Then, last week, a miracle occurred!

Kerstin Lorenz, running for a seat in the Bundestag, keeled over dead in the middle of a campaign speech from a stroke. Frau Lorenz, 47 years old at the time of her death, was an extreme right-wing candidate of the NPD from the eastern German city of Dresden. Now, while it is true that the German Verfassungsgericht (equivalent of the Supreme Court) has ruled that the NPD is, in fact, not technically a neo-Nazi party, and is therefore legal under post-1945 German law, the position of the NPD on issues such as immigration and asylum, or the use of tax dollars to reconstruct synagogues in Germany, places them far enough to the right of the political spectrum that the Germans I have discussed this with, agree with me that these folks are, de facto Nazis. The NPD has won some seats in at the state governmental level in the eastern Land of Saxony but does not have any representation in the Bundestag nor does it appear likely to be getting any time soon. Candidate Lorenz had no chance of winning a seat, but her death may determine who the next Bundeskanzler will be!

Under German election law, all of the ballots in Dresden have to be reprinted. This is going to result in a delay in the polling there in the federal election until October 2. The rest of the country will still vote on September 18. German law also requires that the results of the voting on September 18 be announced as soon as the results are in an official. Thus, the 290,000 or so voters in Dresden will know who is in the lead for the Chancellor’s seat and by how much before they have to cast their votes! In theory, at least, if the election is close enough (and it appears that it might yet be that close), the voters of Dresden can swing the election one way or the other and pick the next Chancellor and ruling party.

Last night’s newscast on LinkTV from Deutsche Welle included some on the street interviews with Germans about this development and there is considerable consternation and upsettedness. CDU (and their alliance partner, the FDP) politicos were screaming mad, fearful that the Dresdeners could throw the election to Schröder and the SPD, but the law is apparently quite clear. Ordnung muss sein in spite of this disorderly development. In more ways than one then Paul Célan was right, “Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland”—“Death is a master from Germany”.