Pressure is mounting on the leadership of Angela Merkel’s conservative party to fortify its “firewall against the far right”, as more members of the Christian Democratic Union were revealed to be members of a shadowy military network with links to “prepper” or survivalist circles. The general secretary of Merkel’s junior coalition partner, the Social Democratic party, on Wednesday accused Kramp-Karrenbauer of failing to crack down on far-right tendencies in her party. “What we are seeing in the CDU’s Saxony-Anhalt branch is a bursting of the dam against the far right,” Lars Klingbeil told Tagesspiegel newspaper. Social Democrat politician Ralf Stegner, meanwhile, said events in Saxony-Anhalt showed “the firewall against the far right is crumbling”. But many senior figures in the party have stopped short of explicitly calling for the expulsion of members with a neo-Nazi past.

Source: The Guardian December 18, 2019 18:00 UTC