German AfD under fire for encouraging children to denounce teachers

Fuente  (dpa) Stuttgart  – A plan by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to introduce online portals where students can denounce their teachers for making partisan comments prompted a backlash in Germany on Tuesday.

«They are organizing open denunciation – these are all building blocks towards totalitarianism,» Winfried Kretschmann, premier of the southern German state of Baden Wuerttemberg, said in Stuttgart.

The AfD’s online portal, which is already live on the AfD website for its Hamburg chapter, is supposed to allow children and parents to submit complaints if their teachers are considered to have violated their duty of remaining politically neutral.

Local media reported on Tuesday that the far-right party, which won seats in parliament last year on an anti-immigrant, anti-establishment platform, plans to expand the portal to nine other federal states.

The German Education Union (GEW) and Deutscher Lehrerverband – the country’s biggest teachers’ union – have expressed their opposition to the plan.

AfD lawmaker Bernd Baumann, a senior member of the party’s parliamentary group, brushed off the criticism, saying the online portal had «nothing to do with denunciation.»

Germans are sensitive about the practice of informing on other people, having lived under regimes that officially encouraged denunciation, such as Nazi Germany and the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR).