Former ally blasts Merkel over rise of right

Germany's former Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich on Saturday accused Merkel of allowing a gap to open to the right of the Christian Social Union (CSU), which he said was now being exploited by populist groups campaigning on an anti-immigration and euroskeptic ticket.

In an interview with German news magazine Spiegel, Friedrich noted the rise of the "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West" movement, also known PEGIDA, as well as the euroskeptic party Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The former interior minister said Merkel had conceded too much to the left - including her coalition partners the Social Democrats (SPD) - while doing too little to address voters' concerns about immigration, the euro and national identity. As a result, he said, new groupings on the right had gained a foothold.

"If you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said 'We will sweep them aside by removing these concerns,'" Friedrich said in comments carried by the magazine's online edition.

"Instead, Mrs. Merkel has decided to take over concerns from the SPD and the Greens," said Friedrich, citing both the government's policy to allow dual citizenship for children of foreign nationals and Germany's plan to abandon nuclear power from 2020.

Threat to traditional right

Friedrich condemned the lack of attention to the right as "a devastating mistake" that could weaken the traditional alliance of parties of Germany's conservative right - essentially Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party the CSU, as well as the business-friendly liberal Free Democrats (FDP).

"I think, in the past, we have not considered properly our approach when it comes to the identity of our people and our nation," said Friedrich.

Some 17,000 anti-Islamic protesters marched under the banner of PEGIDA in Dresden last week, an increase on previous weeks. The rallies have spread across Germany since a local social media appeal made in Dresden two months ago in response to plans to add 14 centers for some 2,000 refugees in the city.

Chancellor Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats expressed concerns last week about an apparent lurch to the right by AfD. The party, initially launched with a set of primarily euroskeptic objectives and projected by pollsters to possibly gain seats at Germany's next general election, has been accused of trying to capitalize on concerns about increasing numbers of refugees.

Friedrich, himself from the CSU, was moved from his post as interior minister to the Agriculture Ministry last year after a general election that saw the CDU and CSU enter a "grand coalition" with their traditional mainstream political rivals, the SPD.

He was forced to relinquish the agriculture brief after admitting that he tipped off top figures in the SPD about a child pornography investigation being conducted into one of its lawmakers at the time, Sebastian Edathy.

rc/cmk (AFP, dpa, Reuters)