Jürgen Elsässer: Difference between revisions

Jürgen Elsässer (born 20 January 1957 in Pforzheim) is a German journalist and political activist. Today he is using his positon as editor-in-chief of a right-conspirancy magazine to set his position as one of the main media influencer of the populist AfD and far-rights in Germany.

Elsässer worked as a teacher in a vocational school in Baden-Württemberg, Germany for 14 years before starting his career as a journalist for left wing magazines in 1994. Elsässer published his first works in the newspaper Arbeiterkampf (Workers' Struggle), a magazine which was tied to the Kommunistischer Bund (communist league), an organisation of which he was a member for years.^{[1][failed verification]} In 1990 he was a sharp critic of the German reunification, because he was afraid of the possible dawn of a Viertes Reich (Fourth Reich).

Elsässer was one of the political creators of the Anti-Germans movement. In 1994, he was editor of the leftist Junge Welt (Young world). He was also co-editor of the largest left-wing monthly magazine konkret until he was dismissed in 2003 because of his criticism of the upcoming Iraq War.^[2]

Elsässer changed his political views to the right.^[3] In 2010 he founded Compact magazine,^[4] of which he was also the editor.

During the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine Elsässer was an outspoken supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin and received a lot of criticism from the German media for this position.^[5]

Elsässer's current political position is commonly considered as right-wing populism^{[citation needed]} and he is a sharp critic of the migration policy of the German chancellor Angela Merkel.^{[6][third-party source needed]}