Since the start of the summer bathing season, violence and sexual assaults at Germany’s public swimming pools by the country’s migrant community have made national headlines and become a red-hot topic. Now, one of Germany’s top newspapers has attempted to explain away the violence due to rising french fry prices.

“The price of fries is rising in outdoor pools. It’s a tragedy — they’re one of the mainstays of summer. No wonder many bathers go nuts,” reads the article from Zeit. The article proceeds to glorify french fries as a staple of every German’s swimming experience and makes further claims about what kind of effect rising prices are having on “unrest” in the pool system.

Many in Germany were quick to pounce on the article. After all, there have been serious incidents inside Germany’s swimming pools, including seven girls who were sexually assaulted in the course of two days at just one location. To critics of the french fry theory behind pool violence, using such a claim to explain severe sexual assault or riots took the debate to a new level of absurdity.

Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is currently the second most popular party in Germany after soaring in the polls — in part due to its strong anti-immigration stance — has been hammering the political and journalist class on the chaos seen at some of the country’s swimming pools.

“Zeit blames ‘french fry prices’ for violence and sexual assaults in outdoor pools, ZDF claims an interplay of heat and the meeting of many people, Deutschlandfunk writes about too high ‘expectations’ that cannot be met. The degree to which the media trivializes migration problems no longer knows any limits,” wrote Alice Weidel, parliamentary leader of the AfD party.

The AfD leader was likely referring to an article from last year, which claimed that climate change and associated temperature increases could explain away the violence at Germany’s swimming complexes. At the same time, Deutchlandfunk argued that bathers had expectations that were impossible to meet, which was sparking mass violence.

However, the actual workers at the swimming pools have offered an entirely different reason for the increasing violence. Just last week, employees of the Columbiabad outdoor swimming complex in Berlin penned a letter to the Der Tagesspiegel newspaper complaining about perpetrators they describe as “mainly Arab migrants and Chechens” who are engaging in the sexual harassment of women and mass brawls on the premises, while also leaving the complexes in disgusting conditions. As a result, the entire pool was shut down for an indefinite period of time due to workers calling out sick from stress.