won 43.8% of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt,<\/a> falling just short of securing an absolute majority in the regional parliament.<\/p>\nThe anti-immigration party also expects strong results in elections on Sunday in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.<\/p>\n
Speaking at a news conference to announce his first squad, Klopp stressed he is not a political “expert” but added: “We had an election where some people may have thought it was OK, while others were saying, ‘my God, what is happening here?’<\/p>\n
“From my perspective as a sportsman, I can say that I would very much like to reclaim the flag for myself, for all of us.<\/p>\n
“I want it so that when someone waves it, no one thinks: ‘What is wrong with you?’ Instead, I want people to understand: You are happy and realise how lucky you were to be born, grow up, or move to this wonderful country.”<\/p>\n
No far-right party has controlled a German state since World War Two, when the ruling Nazi party carried out the Holocaust.<\/p>\n
“I do not want to entrust national pride to the wrong people,” said Klopp, who prefers the term “positive patriotism” to “national pride”, which he fears can be misunderstood.<\/p>\n
The former Liverpool boss added: “I can be proud to be German while also being open-minded and diverse, and kind and friendly.”<\/p>\n
Klopp also said it was more important that the country had enough doctors and caregivers but said football can “foster a sense of community, so that people can truly feel the power of sport”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New Germany coach Jurgen Klopp says his team can help ensure “national pride is not entrusted to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":627569,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-627568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627568\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/627569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}