German Anti-Euro Party Sees Future at Stake in State Vote By Rainer Buergin Aug 25, 2014 Alternative for Germany, the party founded last year with the goal of breaking up the euro area, faces its own survival test in a regional election that’s a proxy contest with Chancellor Angela Merkel. After winning parliamentary seats for the first time in European elections in May when anti-mainstream parties from Greece to the U.K. surged, Alternative for Germany is struggling for momentum. Polls in Saxony, the party’s national stronghold, suggest the chances of entering its first state legislature in Germany in the Aug. 31 vote are touch-and-go. Ruled by Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union since German reunification in 1990, Saxony has car-building plants by Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW), Volkswagen AG (VOW) and Porsche that help make it the most prosperous state in the formerly communist east. To make inroads, Alternative for Germany is muting its anti-euro push and campaigning on topics such as education and family policy to lure voters disgruntled with Merkel’s shift toward the political center. “It’s been said that this is a fateful election and while I don’t want to overrate it, it is just that in the end,” Frauke Petry, 39, the party’s lead candidate in Saxony, said in an interview in Leipzig on Aug. 18. “We have to succeed here because our chapters in the other states are relying on the momentum to make it, too.”
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 10:14:48 +0000
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