BERLIN, Nov 16 (Reuters) - A politician in Germany's main centre-left party has sparked outcry within his Social Democrats (SPD) by coming to the defence of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), who have been compared to the Nazis.
Hans Pueschel, a longstanding SPD mayor of Krauschwitz, a village of some 560 people in eastern Germany, published a letter in defence of the NPD after attending one of their rallies and said he agreed with much of what they said.
Fears have arisen that Germany could see the rise of an extreme right party since SPD politician and ex-central banker Thilo Sarrazin became a bestselling author and earned widespread backing for a slew of remarks about Muslim immigrants.
Pueschel said that like Sarrazin, the NPD were addressing issues which had been ignored for too long in Germany, arguing that the state was doing too much to help immigrant families who refused to integrate and failing to look after its own people.
'I want them to get into parliament so that the parties in the centre get a fire lit under their backsides. Otherwise nothing will get done,' Pueschel told Reuters, looking ahead to a state vote in his home state of Saxony-Anhalt next year.
'Our first priority is to take care of our own children, and there are huge problems there,' the 62-year-old said.
'If they're not German citizens and they don't want to become them because they're not interested in learning German, then they should go back to where they came from.'
Katrin Budde, head of the SPD in Saxony-Anhalt, where the party rules in coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), said Pueschel's actions were helping to make neo-Nazi views acceptable in Germany.
'We saw where all that led in the Weimar Republic,' she told MDR radio, referring to the period before the Nazis took power.
As the Weimar Republic crumbled in 1933, the SPD was the only party in parliament to vote against a law that effectively turned Germany into a dictatorship under Adolf Hitler.
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Pueschel, who is head of his local church council, said he spent 1 1/2 hours at an NPD rally earlier this month, and found much to agree with in the speeches they heard.
'I barely encountered one sentence that I couldn't have signed up to myself,' he wrote in an open letter which a local newspaper refused to publish and is now on the NPD's website.
Parties like the CDU, the SPD and the Greens had failed on education, ignored the growing ranks of the elderly, and allowed demographics to get out of kilter in Germany, Pueschel said.
'The NPD address that in their election manifesto, they say something needs to happen in Germany,' he said.
'We're quite happy to throw 100 million euros at the banks and financial capitalism, but if somebody wants to spend 100 million euros on children or kindergartens, what then?,' he said. 'People on the street say what I'm saying is right.'
The NPD, which the government has previously tried to ban, sits in two of eastern Germany's six state parliaments.
Pueschel, who helped found a local branch of the SPD after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, said he did not plan to encourage voters to back the NPD in the Saxony-Anhalt election.
'I don't need to,' he said. 'If they do, they'll get votes from the part of the population that doesn't vote any more.'
He also did not think his views would hurt his own party.
'I don't think Sarrazin has had a negative impact on support for the SPD, more likely a positive one. And it's the same here. I stand by what I said,' he said. 'I'm not here to praise the NPD. I think we just need to take a realistic view of them.'
(Editing by Charles Dick) Keywords: GERMANY FARRIGHT/ (dave.graham@reuters.com; Reuters Messaging: dave.graham.reuters.com@reuters.net; 49 30 2888 5217) COPYRIGHT Copyright Thomson Reuters 2010. All rights reserved. The copying, republication or redistribution of Reuters News Content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters.
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