After the AfD board decision against the EU’s top candidate Maximilian Krah, it is no longer an expression of opinion to say: The AfD is a party of strange birds. As of yesterday it is a statement of fact. And these strange birds mainly sit on the top perch.
We journalists should not fight the AfD or protect it, but we should describe it. It deserves a cool look.
For journalism that strives to keep its distance and is committed to the facts, this party is not a suspected case, but rather an object of observation. The good journalist doesn’t hate, but he hears, sees and feels – ideally also what others don’t hear, see or feel.
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He is, as the former “Spiegel” editor-in-chief Stefan Aust put it, a “mistake-seeker” by nature. He or she has mastered what the publicist Gabriele Tergit, who was persecuted in the Third Reich, called the “trained eye of ruthlessness.”
And what you see in the AfD camp seems bizarre at first glance and unsavory at second glance. What we are dealing with here – and after yesterday’s board decision, this is no longer an expression of opinion, but rather a statement of fact – is a party of strange birds.
These are by no means only located in the lower official body, but now mainly on the upper rung.
The first man on the AfD list for the European elections is now so scary to his fellow campaigners on the board that they have banned him from appearing in the election campaign. His name: Maximilian Krah.
After a festival of politically damaging provocation by Krah, the party has banned its leading European candidate from appearing. A party spokesman confirms that this applies to all AfD election campaign events and other federal party events. Krah wants to withdraw from the party’s federal executive board.
Neither the Italian, French or Polish right-wing populists want to make a pact with this AfD. The leading candidate of the French right-wing populists – Jordan Bardella – made it clear this week that he no longer wants to sit in a joint parliamentary group with the AfD.
The reason for this divorce certificate were statements made by AfD top candidate Krah to the Italian newspaper “La Repubblica”, where he was not prepared to distance himself from the SS, but said how he sees the matter:
“I will never say that anyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal.”
You have to judge from case to case: “Among the 900,000 SS men there were also many farmers: There was certainly a high percentage of criminals, but not only.” Because “Günter Grass was also a member of the Waffen-SS,” said Krah.
AfD Bundestag member Petr Bystron, founder and head of a former advertising agency that now produces and markets leather shoes, is said to have taken money from Russia. This is what the Czech secret service claims, according to a report in the Czech newspaper Deník N.
Both the Bundestag administration and the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office are now dealing with the matter, and the MP’s immunity has been lifted. Last week, police officers from the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office searched properties in Berlin and Bavaria as well as on Mallorca and seized evidence. Officials also examined the MP’s home in Berlin-Wannsee.
Since the allegations became known, Bystron has refrained from making public appearances. Within the party, he, like Krah, is no longer considered presentable. This means that the duo at the top of the European list has been de facto taken out of circulation.
There are calls for party expulsion proceedings against the top candidate in Thuringia, which some of his Thuringian party friends would like to initiate against him. Of all people, the man who enjoys playing with the darkness of the Nazi era and its linguistic and symbolic legacy is accused of sabotaging his own party and wanting to support an alternative list for a Thuringian district council election.
The AfD mayoral candidate in the district, Jörg Gasda, says:
\u0009″He brings in the yes-men who are easy to deal with: these are people who stand at the gas station in the morning with beer.”
His enemy is the left and anti-fascism: “Today’s anti-fascism makes you evil, ugly and stupid,” he writes in his volume of conversations “Never into the same river twice,” published in 2018.
The former public prosecutor and now independent member of the Bundestag, Thomas Seitz, did not give his party a good report in a memorable farewell video:
“The prevailing feeling is still that of pure disgust for my own party, which I have been supporting for ten years.”
Seitz himself was part of the ethnic wing, called Barack Obama a “quota negro” and lost his civil servant status because of these and other racist statements. The AfD’s internal party conditions were not compatible with its understanding of democracy. He goes on to say in the video:
“If the AfD cannot keep its own shop clean, how can it live up to the claim of saving Germany?”
The former Goldman Sachs analyst and later employee of Allianz Global Investors saw the AfD as a good buying opportunity and political takeover candidate after the resignations and departures of her predecessors Bernd Lucke, Frauke Petry and Jörg Meuthen.
Since then, it has been trying to expand its position of power in various deal structures, to use the jargon of investment bankers. First against, now with Björn Höcke.
You can call Alice Weidel unscrupulous or hyperflexible. What is certain is that in February 2017 she spoke on the board in favor of expelling Björn Höcke from the party after he called for a “180-degree turnaround in remembrance policy” and described the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame”. had.
Weidel found this “damaging to the party” and “wrong” at the time.
When she couldn’t get her way, she established a non-aggression pact with the Thuringian top candidate, which still holds today.
She endures the misogynistic sayings of her party friends Krah (“Feminists are all ugly and horrible”) and Höcke (“We have to rediscover our masculinity”) in the knowledge that the relocation of her place of residence to Switzerland and her registered partnership with the film producer Sarah Bossard make them vulnerable in the nationally minded men’s party AfD. Weidel is not primarily a political believer, but rather a strategic opportunist. That’s what makes them so successful.
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Conclusion: No state can be created with this AfD. The way this party is currently behaving, it needs no constitutional protection and no party political opponents. She has herself.