BERLIN — Leading members of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party called on Bavarian Deputy Premier Hubert Aiwanger to resign following a widening anti-Semitic scandal.
His boss, Bavarian Premier Markus Söder, also faced mounting pressure to fire Aiwanger if he doesn’t step down voluntarily.
Aiwanger admitted over the weekend he was involved in distributing an antisemitic leaflet during his high school years in the late 1980s, even though he denies being the author. On Wednesday, a former classmate of Aiwanger claimed that the Bavarian politician made Hitler salutes while in school, along with anti-Semitic jokes and impersonating Hitler.
This has developed into a political storm ahead of the Bavarian state election on October 8, in which Söder — who hails from the center-right Christian Social Union — hopes to get reelected thanks to the political support of Aiwanger’s right-wing Free Voters party, currently governing in a coalition with the Söder and polling around 14 percent.
Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party or SPD, which leads Germany’s national governing coalition but remains in the opposition in Bavaria, said Aiwanger must step down.
“That which is seeing the light of day, piece by piece, is an attitude that can only have one consequence: resignation,” Dirk Wiese, the deputy parliamentary group leader of SPD, told the German daily Rheinische Post.
Free Voter supporters outside of Bavaria are left shaking their heads “and are stunned by Aiwanger,” Wiese added.
Speaking to POLITICO, SPD parliamentary whip Katja Mast described the accusations against Aiwanger as “deeply disturbing” and said that the Nazi leaflet scandal could not be written off as a “sin of youth.”
She urged Söder to act: “Now it’s up to the [Bavarian] premier to answer and act responsibly.”
Thus far, Söder has held a private meeting with his deputy on Tuesday. “We are putting together 25 questions we will give to Hubert Aiwanger to answer,” Söder said afterward in Munich.
At a press conference on Thursday, Aiwanger claimed there was a political campaign against him. While addressing journalists, he did not respond to demands to resign, nor did he accept questions.
He did issue a statement reading, “I also made mistakes as a young person. I deeply regret if I hurt feelings through my behavior in relation to the pamphlet.” He went on to apologize to the victims of the Nazi regime and their survivors, and again denied writing the pamphlet. “I was never an anti-Semite,” he said.
In a television interview on Wednesday, Aiwanger argued that “for the last decades” he had been “not anti-Semite, not a right-wing extremist,” raising eyebrows since that did not address his youth.