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Jürgen Elsässer (born 20 January 1957 in Pforzheim) is a German journalist and political activist.
Life and work
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. 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 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. 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.
Elsässer changed his political views to the right. In 2010 he founded Compact magazine, 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's regime and received a lot of criticism from the German media for this position.
Elsässer's current political position is widely considered as right-wing populism and he is a sharp critic of the migration policy of the German chancellor Angela Merkel.