Germany’s AfD candidate links arms production to migrant deportation plans

• Siegmund says arms production could provide resources for AfD’s plans to deport irregular migrants

Saxony-Anhalt’s AfD premier hopeful Ulrich Siegmund linked arms production to his party’s planned deportation campaign, drawing sharp criticism Friday from rival parties, including the BSW, the only group still open to talks with him.

Asked after the AfD’s founding group meeting in Magdeburg about Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems’ plans to build a plant in the state, Siegmund said his party does not reject arms manufacturing in principle.

“Our position is quite clear: we do not demonize the production of armaments across the board, because in a later remigration and deportation offensive we will of course also need corresponding aids — of course also in the sense of internal security,” Siegmund said.

Any plan, he said, would have to be examined case by case. “We want to look closely at what is being produced there, under what conditions, and whether we thereby run the risk of involving ourselves in foreign conflicts. Then we would see that more critically.”

Center-left SPD state parliament group leader Katja Paehle called the remarks extremely worrisome and said the AfD was introducing violence into its mass-expulsion plans.

“Anyone who, alongside the announced mass expulsion of people from Saxony-Anhalt, brings armaments into play is talking about violence as a means of politics,” Paehle said. She rejected any reading of the comments as a slip of the tongue, calling them “a political threat.”

BSW co-chair Fabio De Masi, whose left-populist party has said it could work with the AfD on projects, also attacked the line. He said the AfD backs rearmament and is justifying the Israeli arms company Elbit’s investment plan by citing the use of arms technology for ‘remigration.’

“That shows: they do not want to govern at all and are desperately looking for a way out through provocation,” De Masi said.

Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems, whose products include drones, howitzers, rocket launchers, and communications equipment, is in talks to build a production site in the city of Sangerhausen, according to media reports. Critics note the company’s weapons have been used by Israel in Gaza.

The anti-immigration AfD won a landslide in Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt election with 43.8% of the vote and 39 of 83 seats in the Magdeburg state parliament — three short of the 42 needed to govern alone. The BSW, with five seats, remains the only party in the new Magdeburg state parliament still willing to talk with the AfD.

The conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the Left Party rejected any cooperation or coalition with the AfD, saying they would not work with a party that the state domestic intelligence service has classified as a “proven right-wing extremist” organization.