With 65,000 people and one of Germany’s largest lakes, the town of Neubrandenburg – two hours north of Berlin – is an unlikely place for a culture war.
Its epicentre: the flagpole above the town’s 19th-century train station. Mostly empty, occasionally the town flag flutters here and, once a year for the local pride parade, the LGBT+ rainbow flag.
Last year and this year, however, the rainbow flag was torn down and replaced with forbidden swastika and nationalist flags.
When the town council voted to ban the rainbow flag entirely from above the train station, the town’s lord mayor, Silvio Witt, who happens to be homosexual, announced his resignation.
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The 46-year-old local man is a popular figure and was re-elected two years ago with 88 per cent of the vote. He says the flag vote was the final straw after a decade-long homophobic campaign against him and his family by local populist and far-right figures.
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From online trolling to bullying allegations against him, never proven, Mr Witt has endured local far-right politicians baiting him with videos of him dancing at a party.
“I was elected because I don’t belong to any party or any network, I was elected because I sort out the pavements or fix the playground,” he said. “But the far-right have pushed a narrative that I am a rainbow mayor pushing a homosexual agenda.”
Mr Witt calls his resignation a personal protest – and a warning about the potential of new extremist political alliances in Germany.
The motion to ban the rainbow flag from the train station was tabled by Tim Grossenmüller, a local independent councillor who owns a hairdresser and gym in Neubrandenburg.
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“We are not against the rainbow flag,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily. “We are against the fetish parties that go with it.”
To pass his motion, however, he secured the backing of the biggest party in the town council, the populist-nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), as well as three councillors from the newly formed left-conservative alliance BSW, named after leftist politician Sahra Wagenknecht.
On the same evening as the rainbow flag ban was passed with BSW support, Dr Wagenknecht, in a televised debate in Berlin with a co-leader of the Alternative for Germany party, insisted her new alliance would not work with the far-right party “in its current form”.
Questioned this week about the AfD-BSW co-operation in Neubrandenburg, Dr Wagenknecht said she had “nothing against the rainbow flag”.
“We don’t analyse every local council decision in the party front bench,” she said. In the Bundestag, where she sits as an MP, she said her party was happy to back any parliamentary motions it viewed as “correct” as long as they didn’t originate with the AfD.
“And in this case,” she added, “the [flag] motion didn’t come from the AfD.”
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