With Germany’s left-wing government sinking in the polls over a spiraling migration crisis and an economy in free fall, the left is starting to run low on voters. German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser may have the solution to the problem: Give asylum seekers the right to vote in local state elections after just six months in Germany. The program, if implemented, would translate into millions of new voters overnight.
“We want to work hard at the federal level and in the Bundesrat to ensure that all people who live in Hessian municipalities for more than six months are given the right to vote in local elections,” describes the election program from her Social Democrats (SPD) in the state of Hesse where Faeser is currently up for election.
According to the government’s own data, the over 1 million people who arrived in Germany from Ukraine, the MIddle East, Asia, and Africa, would immediately gain voting rights across Germany.
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Currently, the right to vote in local elections only applies to citizens from other EU countries.
Bild newspaper asked the SPD to clarify what the massive expansion of voting rights would actually mean. An SPD spokesman responded that the party’s statement should have specifically defined the new voters as those “who have a permanent residence permit.” However, this would still apply to a range of asylum seekers from countries such as Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea.
Faeser is known for her hardline left-wing political positions, persecution of conservatives, and calls for mass censorship; she was also previously revealed to have written for Antifa magazine shortly before becoming interior minister.
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The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was immediately critical of what it describes as an attempt to stack the vote with migrants, releasing a statement that read: “Interior Minister Faeser (SPD), as the top candidate in the Hessian state elections, is campaigning for local voting rights for all people who have lived in Germany for ‘longer than six months.’ This means that supposed ‘refugees’ from Afghanistan, Syria or Turkey would also be allowed to vote – even without German citizenship.
“The German passport is thus turned into a piece of junk. But above all: Faeser and the SPD want to attract people who have no connection to Germany at all as new groups of voters. This is not surprising, because the locals who are ridiculed as ‘non-migrants’ are running away from (Chanceller Olaf) Scholz’s SPD.”
