Financial safety

Germany's Anti-Immigration Party Takes Aim at the ECB

Germany’s surging anti-immigration party isn’t just railing against asylum seekers. It’s also gunning for the European Central Bank, an alleged “master plan” to eliminate cash and negative deposit rates that it says amount to financial “repression.”

To Alternative for Germany, a proposal by the German Finance Ministry to limit cash transactions to 5,000 euros ($5,670) and ECB considerations to phase out the 500-euro note are more than measures aimed at curtailing criminal activity. They’re a first step in banning paper money and robbing helpless account holders of their privacy, according to Joerg Meuthen, the party’s co-chairman.

“This is a master plan on the road to eliminating cash in order to take complete control over financial transactions,” Meuthen, a professor of economics at the University of Public Administration in Kehl, said in an interview Thursday. “Everything people spend will be completely under surveillance by the state.”