It’s an embarrassing error for any political party to make, let alone a nationalist one. On Monday, a branch of Germany’s far-right AfD (Alternatives for Germany) tweeted a picture of a mountain landscape with the headline “Our program for Germany” and a call to action: “Take your country back.”
Just one problem — the mountain is the Matterhorn and it’s in Switzerland.
The tweet, sent from the official Twitter account of the party’s Nuremberg branch, has since been deleted. But the image — and the “take your country back” message — has been used in other tweets from the same account.
AfD representatives were not immediately available for comment.
The AfD is hoping to enter the German parliament for the first time in the federal election at the end of September.
Formed in 2013, the party won 4.7% of the vote in the national election that year, just short of the 5% it needed to send representatives to the Bundestag.
The party is campaigning on an anti-immigrant and socially conservative platform. The manifesto calls for the immediate closure of Germany’s borders and describes the presence of five million Muslims in Germany as “a big danger for our state, our society and our values.”
For many German politicians, immigration is seen as a way to counteract the low birth rate in Germany.
But in their manifesto, the AfD issues a stark warning about the German “trend towards self-abolition” and promises to support “traditional” families: “father, mother and children.”
“New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves,” reads one official campaign poster.
Current polls suggest the AfD could win 7% to 10% of the vote in September, an improvement on its 2013 result. The party is battling with the Greens and the Left Party to be the third-largest party in the Bundestag after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democrats, led by Merkel’s challenger, Martin Schulz.
These projections suggest a loss of support for the party since last year, however, when a series of terror attacks in Germany boosted support for the anti-Islam party to 15%.
