German immigration foe now a migrant

Lutz Bachmann has frequently been criticized for not sticking to his own principles.

One of his main messages as leader of Germany's anti-immigration movement Pegida, the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, is to deport criminal foreigners as part of a "zero-tolerance policy." Bachmann's criminal record includes theft, assault, drug dealing and burglary, something he rarely discussed publicly.

Now, the face of Germany's anti-immigration movement has become a migrant himself. Saying that he has faced "persecution" in Germany, Bachmann now spends most of his time in Tenerife in the Canary Islands off the West African coast.

Bachmann had previously described refugees as "junk," "animals" and "filth" on Facebook, and he once photographed himself with an Adolf Hitler moustache, publicly ridiculing refugees fleeing repression and war. Such rhetoric turned Bachmann into one of the leaders of Germany's rightist political scene.

Although he avoided describing himself as a "migrant," Bachmann explained in a Facebook video that he had lived and worked on the Spanish island for several months. He cited several alleged break-in attempts at his house in the eastern German city of Dresden as one of the reasons why he and his wife left Germany.

Bachmann is hardly the only anti-immigration advocate who has recently embraced the idea of migration. Germany's ZDF television recently reported that a growing number of Germans opposed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's pro-refugee policies had moved to Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban built a border fence last year.

In Dresden, Pegida continues to attract hundreds of people to its weekly protest marches. The rightist Alternative for Germany party, which operates independently from Pegida, is now considered one of the three most popular parties in the country, and it has made gains in recent regional state elections.

German authorities, however, have recently cracked down on radical parts of the rightist movement. Earlier this year, Bachmann was found guilty of "inciting the people," a criminal offense that dates back to fears that populists and neo-Nazis would regain power after World War II.

SundayMonday on 09/25/2016

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