Voting for far-Right party is ‘un-Christian’, says leading German bishop

Bishop Georg Batzing urges voters to reject AfD at ballot box this weekend

Germany’s most senior Catholic clergyman has urged voters to reject the AfD at state elections on Sunday, saying that voting for the party would be “un-Christian”.
Ahead of elections in the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, Bishop Georg Batzing said: “Right-wing extremists like the AfD in Thuringia are not electable for Christians”.
Bishop Batzing, who is chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, claimed the party wanted to “overthrow our democratic, liberal system” and said it was his duty to “warn Christians against them”.
The Church and the anti-immigration party have long been at loggerheads.
The AfD previously criticised the Church over its support for Angela Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders to hundreds of thousands of refugees in 2015.
In February, the Bishops’ Conference issued a formal declaration that the AfD were un-electable because “their ethno-national stance is incompatible with Christian values.”
It is unclear how much impact, if any, Bishop Batzing’s intervention will have on the outcome of the elections.
Catholicism is only a minority religion in the east of Germany, where Martin Luther was a professor in the town of Wittenberg when he published his 95 theses that led to the Reformation in 1517.
East Germany has also been labelled “the most Godless place on Earth” because so many people there identify as atheists, a phenomenon often attributed to four decades of communist rule.
A string of polls over recent months have put the far-Right AfD in the lead in both Thuringia and Saxony.
The latest polling puts support for the party at 32 per cent in Saxony, ahead of the centre-Right Christian Democrats (CDU) in second place at 30 per cent.
Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) are set to win just 6 per cent of the vote.
In Thuringia, the AfD is polling at 30 per cent with the CDU at 20 per cent and the SPD at 6 per cent.
If the polls prove accurate, it would mark the first time that the AfD have won the most votes in such high-level elections.
State intelligence agencies in both Saxony and Thuringia have classified the local chapters of the AfD as “verifiably Right-wing extremist.”
Unlike in the UK, Germany’s domestic intelligence plays an active role in monitoring political parties and protest movements.
The intelligence service sees itself as an “early warning system” that detects potential threats to democracy and is meant to stop a repeat of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
In Thuringia, the AfD is led by Bjorn Hocke, a former history teacher who has been found guilty of intentionally using banned Nazi slogans during campaign speeches.
The AfD did not immediately respond to a request from The Telegraph for comment.