After failed talks, right-wing German party takes aim at Islam

A surging German nationalist party has sharpened its rhetoric against prominent Islamic groups and is suggesting limiting the religious freedom of more than 4 million Muslims in the country.

Senior members of Alternative for Germany (AfD) cut short a meeting Monday with the Central Council of Muslims, accusing the group of failing to renounce religious beliefs that clash with the German constitution.

Party co-leader Frauke Petry told reporters that “Islam, the way it is mostly practiced, doesn’t belong in a democratic Germany.”

The AfD, founded on a euroskeptic platform three years ago, has since protested against Germany’s record refugee influx that last year brought more than one million asylum seekers to Europe’s top economy.

Aiman Mazyek, the head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD), who initiated the meeting held in a Berlin hotel room, said the AfD’s anti-Islam stance was unconstitutional because it discriminates against an entire religion, charging the party’s policies were reminiscent of Germany’s dark Nazi past.

An AfD co-chair, Frauke Petry, said there was nothing left to talk about after the Muslim group had compared her party to the Nazis.

The party, which has won regional assembly seats in a series of state elections, declared early this month that “Islam does not belong to Germany” and said it wants to ban minarets, the call of the muezzin and the full facial veil.

Mazyek, whose group represents only a part of Germany’s four-million-strong Islamic community, said at the time that the AfD was the first German party since Hitler’s Nazis to discredit and threaten an entire religious group.

Mazyek said after the short meeting Monday that the AfD had left no doubt that it intends to continue to “follow the path of populism, defamation and prejudice”.

He said his group’s position was that the German constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion, “is non-negotiable.”