Jürgen Elsässer

Jürgen Elsässer in 2008

Jürgen Elsässer (born 20 January 1957 in Pforzheim) is a German journalist and political activist.

Life and work

Elsässer worked for 14 years as a teacher in a vocational school in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, before he started 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), a organisation in which Elsässer was a member for years.^[1] 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 Elsässer he was editor of the Junge Welt (Young world), the former daily of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth), the youth mass organisation of the former ruling GDR-party SED. Elsässer was also co-editor of the largest left-wing monthly magazine konkret until 2003 he was dismissed because of his criticism of the upcoming Iraq War.^[2] Elsässer changed his political views to the right. In 2010 he founded the compact magazine ^[3] magazine, in which he also is the editor. In the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine Elsässer is a outspoken supporter of the regime of the Russian president Vladimir Putin. For this position he received a lot of criticism from the German mass media.^[4] Elsässer's current political position is widely considered as right-wing populism. Elsässer is a sharp critic of the migration policy of the german chancellor Angela Merkel.^[5]

References