Bavarian President Markus Söder this Sunday appeared before the press without questions in Munich. LOUISA OFF (Portal)
The scandal, which was sparked in Germany by the news that Bavarian Vice President Hubert Aiwanger had distributed an anti-Semitic leaflet with Nazi language in his youth, will for now be resolved without resignation or termination. The Bavarian President, the conservative Markus Söder, announced this Sunday that he was keeping his number two in office, who is also the country’s economics minister and chairman of the “Free Voters” party, with which the Union governs in a coalition. Christian Social Party (CSU) from Söder.
Elections will take place on October 8th in Bavaria, Germany’s second most populous state. The scandal that broke a week ago has rocked the election campaign and outraged a country that harshly punishes any expression of anti-Semitism. For Söder, “the matter is settled.” He will not give up his vice president because he assures that his dismissal would be a “disproportionate” reaction to an event that initially consists of the distribution of the brochure 35 years ago, when Aiwanger was at the institute studied. There was no evidence, Söder assured in a short appearance without any questions that he was the author of the brochure.
The Bavarian head of state, who faces complicated elections and is very far from an absolute majority with a voting intention of 39%, had asked Aiwanger to respond in writing to 25 questions about the brochure, a handwritten sheet reproduced by the Münchner Süddeutsche Zeitung became. He did it on the weekend. The answers appear to have convinced him that the facts are not serious enough to force him out of government. Aiwanger, Söder assured during the press conference, had apologized for the incident. Of course he did it “late,” he said, in the only apparent criticism of the behavior of his partner, with whom he hopes to recast the coalition.
The events occurred during the 1987-1988 school year when teenager Aiwanger was in high school. The teachers found a typed sheet in his backpack on which he made macabre jokes about the Holocaust. It simulated a fictitious competition for the “greatest traitor” and proposed the winner as first prize a “free flight through the chimney of Auschwitz”, in reference to the extermination camp where the Nazis murdered more than a million people, mostly Jews.
The Vice President of Bavaria and Chairman of the Free Voters, Hubert Aiwanger, had himself photographed with a falcon at a public event this Sunday. LOUISA OFF (Portal)
Aiwanger denied being the author of the pamphlet and apologized for his “hurt feelings,” but has not clarified what role he played in its distribution or confirmed who wrote it. His older brother Helmut has claimed authorship, asked for forgiveness and explained that when he wrote it he was going through a difficult time because he had failed his exams. The leader of the Free Voters also did not clarify whether he had Nazi sympathies in his youth, something that several former classmates have accused him of, who reported that he gave the Nazi salute and rehearsed Hitler speeches in front of him, per Spiegel. Aiwanger was punished at school for preparing a lecture on the Third Reich.
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In addition to his late apology, the lack of clarity from the Bavarian vice president caused outrage in Germany, who devoted his appearance last week to denouncing himself as the victim of a witch hunt instead of making a statement. In front of the press, without taking any questions, he said that he was no longer anti-Semitic “since adulthood,” a sentence that more than one person has read as an admission of his philonasism in his youth.
The polls show a panorama in which the CSU, the Christian Democrats’ sister party to the CDU, will need a partner to form a government from October 8th. Since the far-right Alternative for Germany is excluded from the cordon sanitaire of all democratic parties, it has only two options: repeat its favorite option with the Free Voters or try to convince the Greens. However, this last option is virtually ruled out by both sides. The CSU, a party further to the right than the CDU, has nothing in common with the environmentalists, who many of their voters consider too left-wing. A poor result from the Free Voters, who received 13-14% of the vote in the last polls, would put Söder in trouble.
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