Letters
Letters to the Editor •
Extremism in Saxony-Anhalt is making its way here too. A quick test
who wrote to the editor-in-chief, Claudio Cerasa
9 SEP 26
Translated by AI
Photo: AP via LaPresse
To the Editor – I believe it is wrong, and ultimately a losing strategy, to think that the response to the Saxony-Anhalt election result should be to follow the AfD onto its own ground: to copy its mindset with a more moderate form of racism, a more polite way of saying ‘there really are too many foreigners’. Those who think this way will end up voting for the original, not its ‘lactose-free’ version. What is needed is not to adopt other people’s scapegoats, but to tackle the root causes of the discontent on which those scapegoats thrive. Today’s German and European discontent stems first and foremost from the crisis in European industry: stagnant productivity, eroded competitiveness, high energy costs, and a poorly managed transition. A crisis that has left millions of workers in the lurch, weakened the less cosmopolitan and more peripheral areas, and made the future more uncertain than the present. We can and must discuss security, integration and immigration rules without accepting the AfD’s framework. But without rebuilding ‘Factory Europe’ (jobs, wages, supply chains, energy at sustainable costs), any discussion will remain fragile. The most pro-European thing that exists today is called income; it is called earnings. Without this, the rest is empty rhetoric.
Piercamillo Falasca
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To the editor – Verbatim statement made to the press by Giuseppe Conte on the elections in Saxony-Anhalt (my own comments added to aid the reader): “We are deeply concerned because a far-right wind is blowing across Europe. We have seen this in Germany, [with the AfD] even proposing to create separate classes for people and pupils with disabilities – that is called segregation. And bear in mind that in Germany we now find ourselves facing the prospect of a military superpower [with] arsenals full of weapons and an AfD claiming to govern the country with the complicity of Meloni, who has endorsed – and indirectly contributed to – all of this by signing up to a European rearmament plan”. A broad vision and precise language. La Ducia can continue to sleep soundly.
Michele Magno
A quick quiz. “If Ukraine wants to keep fighting, that is its right, but it is none of our business.” Who said this? “Arms supplies do not end the war, but increase the suffering.” Who said this? “Security through diplomacy, not through escalation.” Who said that? “We need a realistic peace solution that takes into account the security interests of all parties to the conflict.” Who said that? “Enough of this escalation.” Who said that? If you are wondering whether one of these statements comes from the AfD, Roberto Vannacci or the Five Star Movement, you will already have realised that the propaganda blowing through Saxony-Anhalt is the same as that blowing across some of the most extreme parties in Italy. It is worth noting that the far-left leader in Saxony-Anhalt who could help the AfD form a government is none other than Sahra Wagenknecht, leader of the German Bsw party, who in 2024 was invited by Giuseppe Conte to the M5S festival to explain, quite literally, what it means ‘to be progressive today’.