GERMANY: German politicians and electoral analysts struggled yesterday to explain the dramatic leap in support for a neo-Nazi party in weekend state elections.
The National Democratic Party (NPD) came from nowhere to take over 9 per cent of the vote in Saxony, comfortably making it into the state parliament in Dresden with the same number of seats as the Social Democrats (SPD).
Combined with the 28 per cent vote for the former communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in neighbouring Brandenburg, one in four voted for an extreme party at the weekend.
Combining the support for the extreme left- and right-wing parties with the 40 per cent of people who didn't vote shows that a majority of people in Saxony and Brandenburg voted against the values of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall as the 15th anniversary approaches.
"The voters were frustrated with the situation in the country and in Berlin and chose protest," said Prof Eckahrd Jesse, a political scientist, calling it a vote against the government's unpopular economic reforms rather than a vote for extremists.
"The NPD itself must be exposed as an extreme-right party. They disguised that in the election campaign and wrote social justice and anti-capitalism on their banners," he said.
German newspapers warned yesterday against giving the NPD too much publicity and most editorials shared the opinion of electoral analysts that this was a simple protest vote.
The left wing Tageszeitung newspaper went further, warning: "The NPD result shows drastically what was clear in the 1990s: in the East there is potential for an authoritarian-fixated right-wing."
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder said the result was "a cause for concern for all democrats", particularly the high NPD support among first-time voters.
The president, Dr Horst Köhler, said there was no cause for concern: "We will survive this." One of Germany's Jewish leaders said the success of the anti-Semitic, xenophobic party was proof that politicians had "ignored the protest signs in the east for too long".
Mr Paul Spiegel, head of the central committee of Jews in Germany, said: "The established parties should take the result very seriously and draw conclusions."
That was not the case yesterday, as the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats blamed one another for the NPD's success.
The NPD will now be represented in a German state parliament for the first time since 1968.