German nationalist leader denies stoking anti-migrant hatred

The leader of a rising German nationalist party is rejecting accusations that her rhetoric has helped stoke anti-migrant hatred, a day after a fire at a former hotel being turned into a refugee home.

Frauke Petry also says her party offers a “very necessary” option for disgruntled conservatives ahead of regional elections next month.

Her Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party is expected to enter three state parliaments in elections on March 13 — benefiting from concerns over the influx of more than a million migrants into Germany over the past year and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s struggles to secure a European solution to the problem.

The party advocates much tougher controls on asylum seekers and has faced criticism over various comments made, including an interview last month in which Petry herself suggested police could shoot refugees trying to enter Germany.

Alexander Ahrens, the mayor of the town of Bautzen, where the former hotel burned over the weekend as onlookers celebrated, earlier accused Petry of “spiritual arson”— a phrase often used in Germany to denounce incitement.

“To say something like that about a political opponent is cheap polemics,” Petry tells foreign reporters in Berlin. She also dismissed as “laughable” suggestions from Germany’s center-left Social Democrats that the domestic intelligence agency should monitor AfD.

— AP