Some call them renegade academics, others call them euro contrarians, Chancellor Angela Merkel calls them a headache. The new Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) is upsetting German political dogma, and EU politics.
The party is led by a small band of prestigious academics and industrialists, the kind of people whom one could expect to be united with their colleagues in the German establishment in supporting the ever-increasing power of the EU and membership of the euro currency.
But they are not.
AfD’s leadership wants less EU bureaucracy on the shoulders of German people and German business. The party wants powers returned from Brussels to Berlin and most of all they want their country out of the euro.
They do not like the way Merkel has forced the German people to take on responsibility for bank debt and national debt across the eurozone countries in order to save the EU-elite’s political project of the euro.
Hans-Olaf Henkel, the former head of IBM operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, is one of seven AfD members of the European Parliament since the elections last month. He financed his own campaign, donating €1m (£800,000) to the party. In an interview with the New York Times this week Henkel said: “Merkel is terrified of us.”
“A country is responsible for its own debts and the stability of its own banks. In order to save the euro they have pushed this overboard. That disturbs me.”
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