Usually the right-wing AfD and the left-wing die LINKE parties in Germany are at loggerheads with very different policy ideas for the nation. But they are united in their disgust for liberal democracy: the AfD would like to establish a type of Volksgemeinshaft consisting only of ethnic Germans while the Left Party is nostalgic for a soviet-like nationalization of industry and abolishing market capitalism. So I guess it is not so surprising that both extreme parties admire Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin. This embrace of Putin by both the far left and the far right has come to the forefront with the poisoning of Alexei Navalny. While all the evidence point to yet another assassination attempt engineered by the Kremlin, leaders of the LINKE and the AfD promote a conspiracy theory that Navalny was the victim of a "false flag" operation carried out by opponents of the Nortstream 2 gas deal between Russia and Germany:
For example, Gregor Gysi, the former left-wing party leader of the Bundestag, made sure people sat up on Friday. In the MDR, the 72-year-old warned of bias against the Russian president. What interest should Putin have in ordering something like that? He knows it will deteriorate relations with the West. He has enough penalties on his neck. Putin would have been particularly stupid if he had to order that, and so I don’t believe it. “
Instead, Gysi speculated about agents who might have gone insane, or talked about troops trying to torpedo the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project. ‘It may also be an opponent of the natural gas pipeline to Germany. Or an opponent in command who knew: if you stage such a murder, which is then blamed on the government, it will deteriorate relations. And you see: it really works. Gysi said that instead of threatening sanctions now, the Russian government should first be given the opportunity to open an investigation.
[...]Gunnar Lindemann (Bundestag member of the far-right AfD) went so far as to claim that Navalny was poisoned “to find a reason to justify further sanctions against Russia”, as he wrote on Facebook. Navalny is therefore an American front man, paid for by the Soros Foundation and the “Clinton-Obama Clan”.
Sascha Lobo, the columnist for Der Spiegel, sees these pro-Putin conspiracies as yet another manifestation of reflexive anti-Americanism in Germany:
Antiamerikanismus ist in Deutschland außerordentlich anknüpfungsfähig in eine Vielzahl verschiedener Milieus und Gruppierungen hinein, von hart links bis rechtsextrem, in den Geschmacksrichtungen antikapitalistisch bis antifreiheitlich. Manche Menschen, die mit der Komplexität der Welt Probleme haben, sehen dann in Putin einen Gegenpol zu den USA, und wenn man das eine hasst, muss man das andere lieben. Dieses Schwarz-Weiß-Denkmuster wird von russischer Propaganda angereichert mit jeder Menge Nato-Feindschaft, ohne Rücksicht auf Geschichte, Gegenwart und Grauwerte. Als Gemeinsamkeit taugt eine tiefe Ablehnung gegen "die da oben".
Meanwhile, Navalny is recovering in a Berlin hospital and will likely continue being a thorn in the side of the Kremlin and its German allies.
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