February\u2019s election is shaping up to be one of the most consequential since the second world war<\/p>\n
In the German city of Karlsruhe, a police investigation has just been launched<\/a> into the distribution of 30,000 flyers designed to resemble deportation plane tickets, many of which were placed in the letterboxes of immigrants. Organised by the far-right Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland party (AfD), the stunt recalled a similar malicious exercise by the neo-Nazi National Democratic party (NDP) in 2013. The difference is that while the NDP \u2013 now renamed the Homeland \u2013 is a fringe movement that has never crossed the 5% threshold of votes necessary to enter the Bundestag, the AfD is now running second in poll<\/a>s, at about 21%.<\/p>\n The booming popularity of a xenophobic party officially<\/a> suspected of anti-constitutional extremism is just the starkest signal of how much is at stake in next month\u2019s snap election in Germany. A national poll in Europe\u2019s largest economy will always be of deep continental significance. But as campaigning begins in earnest, there are grounds beyond the issue of immigration for judging this to be one of the country\u2019s most consequential contests since the second world war.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" February\u2019s election is shaping up to be one of the most consequential since the second world war In the German city of Karlsruhe, a police investigation has just been launched into the distribution of 30,000 flyers designed to resemble deportation plane tickets, many of which were placed in the letterboxes of immigrants. Organised by the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}