BERLIN, May 5 (UPI) -- A politician from German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives has left the party after marching in a neo-Nazi demonstration.
Bernhard Lasinski, a local Berlin politician, last month joined a march protesting the construction of a mosque organized by the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany, or NPD.
He since resigned from all his party posts.
"We can't tolerate cooperation with right-wing extremists," Friedbert Pflueger, of Merkel's Christian Democrat Union, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. Pflueger is in the running to become Berlin's next mayor, and also opposes the planned construction of the mosque in Berlin's Pankow district.
Conservatives claim the Ahmadiyya Muslim Church, the organization behind the building of the mosque, is a sect and should not build its mosque in Pankow, a district which houses none of its members.
German intelligence says the group is peaceful and not extremist. Officials of the church say their fellow members -- some 200 Muslims -- are spread throughout Berlin.
