Weltschmerz à GogoThe town council of Rosslau, Germany, about 70 miles southwest of Berlin, has just elected a new mayor who used to be a member of a banned neo-nazi group.
Laurens Nothdurft is a member of Alternative for Germany (surprise!) who was once a member of Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend (HDJ, roughly: German Youth Faithful to the Homeland), which was banned in 2009 for spreading racist and Nazi propaganda. Apparently HDJ was so bad it's even on AfD's "incompatibility list" of organizations that party members aren't allowed to join or have joined. But state-level party organizations are allowed to make exceptions.
Nothdurft was also once a member of the counterintuitively named National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD, which rebranded last year as Die Heimat, or "The Homeland"). NPD was founded in 1964 as a kind of umbrella party so that the various small and regional post-WWII nationalist parties could pool their resources. They've been a marginal presence in German politics since the early 1970s, but have remained a point of contact between overt Nazi street thugs and (slightly) more politically savvy radical nationalists the whole time.
Rosslau proper has a population of ca. 12,000, but it's part of the city of Dessau-Rosslau, which has ca. 80,000 people and is one of the largest cities in the state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Antiautoritärer Tassendiktator
Andreas Froese
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