The far-right AfD party vowed a "new era" as it made its debut Tuesday at the first sitting of Germany's newly-elected parliament, setting the tone for four years of fractious parliamentary sessions.
At the meeting's opening, the AfD immediately sparked outcry by comparing itself to a victim of notorious Nazi Hermann Goering. Its quips were slammed as "tasteless."
But the flare-up appeared to be a harbinger of future Bundestag sittings, as the AfD's leading figures have repeatedly smashed taboos by staking claims to German identity and challenging Germany's culture of atonement over World War II and the Holocaust.
"Take note: the old Bundestag has been voted out. The people have decided, a new era begins now," said the AfD's parliamentary group chief Bernd Baumann.
"From this hour on, the issues will be renegotiated -- not your manoeuvres and tricks on parliamentary business but the euro, massive debt, enormous immigration numbers, open borders and brutal criminality in our streets," he vowed.
The AfD's arrival in the Bundestag is nothing short of a political earthquake in post-war Germany.
Railing against the more than one million asylum seekers who have come to Germany since 2015, the Islamophobic party had capitalized on anger among some Germans over the new arrivals.
"It's a depressing and unsettling feeling to know that there are now people sitting in the Bundestag who appear to want to hide the Nazi past and to target Muslims and asylum seekers," said Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, on Tuesday.
Several thousand people marched past Berlin's Reichstag building Sunday to protest the arrival of "hate and racism" to parliament.
