UK Edition
German anti-immigrant party accidentally makes foreigners face of poster campaign
Germany’s fiercely anti-immigrant AfD party regards many eastern Europeans as scroungers seeking to live off the country’s generous welfare state.
So there was considerable embarrassment among party officials after it emerged that the two smiling young people featured on a party recruitment poster were actually from Romania.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose leader said earlier this year that German police should be ready to shoot migrants to prevent them entering the country illegally, was founded three years ago with a Eurosceptic message.
Its popularity has soared over the past year among Germans angered by the influx of more than a million migrants, and it is currently polling at about 15 per cent nationwide after winning seats in three state elections in March.
A recruitment poster for AfD in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg was part of a campaign to bring more new members into the party.
It showed two smiling young people dressed in blue - the party’s colour - with their thumbs up in an apparent endorsement of the slogan “Join us! Change politics!”
But it quickly emerged that the young folk were not German at all, but former Miss Romania Carla Caucean and male model Adi Ene, also from Romania.
When it was pointed out to AfD officials in Baden-Württemberg that a pair of eastern European were the smiling faces of the campaign, they responded that they had been given the pictures, which came from stock image websites, by a branch of the party in another region.
The campaign advert was quickly removed from the party's Facebook page.
In a similarly embarrassing misuse of stock photos, France’s far-Right Front National used a picture of a homeless man in a 2012 campaign poster to illustrate what it said were the devastating effects of then president Nicolas Sarkozy’s economic policies.
But it soon emerged that the “homeless” man was an American actor pretending to be living on the street and that the picture was from a stock image website.