BERLIN _ Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble evoked Germany's Nazi past to warn an anti-immigration party against running a campaign in next year's federal election mimicking the harsh rhetoric used by Donald Trump.
"We've had enough of this in Germany, we don't need this any more," Schaeuble said at a panel discussion in Berlin on Friday. "We mustn't make minorities the scapegoats of problems we can't solve ourselves. Whoever starts this ends up where we once were in Germany, at the end of German history."
The Alternative for Germany party has been draining support from Schaeuble's own Christian Democratic Union in part over opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door refugee policy.
Merkel, who has declined thus far to reveal whether she will run again for a fourth term next year, has called a press conference for Sunday where she may outline her future political plans. While her party has lost support, the CDU still leads in all national polls.
Merkel said on Thursday that governments everywhere need to work to "hold societies together." Speaking alongside President Barack Obama in Berlin, she contrasted the East German pro-democracy movement that brought down the Berlin Wall with the populist surge in Europe and U.S.
"We can't have a situation where people associated with certain groups now say, 'We are the people and everyone else isn't the people,"' Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, told reporters.
Commenting on the possibility of Trump shaking up the post-World War II order, Schaeuble said Germany "will survive" and agreed with others that "the office is stronger than the incumbent."
"We have to get along with whomever the Americans elect," he said. While it's unclear who will be nominated as his future U.S. counterpart, "I'll wait to see who it will be and then we'll work together."
