‘It starts with us’: Roma rights defender warns AfD win normalises hatred of minorities

Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, an equal rights experts and defender of Roma minority rights, says the historic Saxony-Anhalt election win by the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) means racism is now normalised in the country. “Roma are always historically among the first communities to be targeted. This does not mean that it ends with us. It starts with us,” she said on Monday (7 September), in reference to the Nazi era-holocaust where Roma were forced to wear the letter Z for Zigeuner [Gypsies]. The term is now being used by some AfD politicians to describe the Roma. Mirga-Kruszelnicka is the executive director for the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, based in Berlin. Speaking to EUobserver, she said the political discourse against the community of Roma and Siniti, some of whom can trace their ancestry in Germany back 500 years, is on the rise. “These results are really very scary, and they are rather an illustration of a broader trend, not only here in Germany but also Europe-wide,” she said, noting that the AfD’s manifesto has a clear nativist agenda. “There is a leniency and legitimacy and kind of normalisation of hate against Roma, that it’s okay to be racist towards us, to discriminate us because we’re somehow irreconcilably different,” she said. The views broadly echo Michael O’Flaherty, the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, who last year described the plight of the Roma as ‘one of the greatest human rights scandals on the continent’. Among other things, the AfD manifesto seeks a pro-ethnic German government. And Saxony-Anhalt's Ulrich Siegmund, who is now set to become the first far-right premier of a German state since World War II, wants to start deportation of irregular migrants on day one. This could possibly also include some non-German Roma, said Mirga-Kruszelnicka. Even though many of Germany's Roma are composed of people who have been in the country for centuries, others arrived during the Balkan wars, and more recently after Russia's brutal assault on Ukraine.