{{Germans are getting tired of: southern European protesters burning their flags and waving placards comparing Chancellor Angela Merkel to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, all in reaction to Berlin’s insistence on reforms and austerity in return for bailout funds.}}
And it’s enough to make people like Berlin businessman Horst Freiberg, who never felt much love for the euro currency, pine more than ever for the return of the German mark.
“I’d immediately vote for a party that wants to abolish the euro,” said Freiberg, who has run a small business selling ink stamps in central Berlin for more than 40 years.
“How can you have one currency with banana republics like Cyprus and Greece? And they always accuse us of being Nazis. It’s sick.”
Such sentiments are still the exception in Germany, where a sense of obligation to help fellow Europeans in distress is rooted in shame for the crimes of the Third Reich.
But a new political party hopes to capitalize on simmering fears that the euro crisis could deepen and drag down Europe’s biggest economy.
It aims to garner enough votes from people like Freiberg in September elections to reach the 5 percent minimum needed for seats in Parliament.
Called Alternative for Germany, the main goal of the party founded by academics and economists is the “orderly dissolution” of the euro, said Frauke Petry, a business owner and party spokeswoman. T
he stance puts the party in sharp opposition to Merkel’s insistence that there can be no Europe without the preservation of the single currency, repeatedly saying “if the euro fails, Europe will fail.”
While still a fledgling movement, the new party could hurt Merkel by sapping support from her main coalition partner — which she has relied on for a stable government.
“For us the euro is at the heart of many problems,” Petry told The Associated Press. “The way decisions are being made in Europe right now shows that many democratic mechanisms don’t work anymore,” she said.
Alternative for Germany wants to introduce Swiss-style national referendums so voters can have a say on important matters — including economic rescue packages.
For all the talk about what they don’t like, however, the party has been short on what they do like and its leaders were slammed in an editorial this week in the top-selling Bild newspaper as “political amateurs.”
The conservative tabloid has never shied away from accusing southern Europeans of being lazy, nor has it stopped deploring the cost Germany shoulders to bail out other nations, but turning against the euro itself remains unthinkable.
“They can craftily explain what is wrong with rescuing the euro, but they have no concept on how the future of Europe should look,” Bild wrote.
Experts believe the party has little chance of garnering enough of the protest vote to reach the 5 percent threshold.
But it could draw enough voters away from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right coalition to force her into an alliance with the opposition or give the opposition an outright majority.
More than 7,000 people have applied to join the party even before its founding congress in Berlin on Sunday, said Petry.
AP
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