Justice Minister Heiko Maas has warned that several parts of the anti-immigration party's election platform are illegal. AfD party candidates are facing accusations of racism and a possible charge of incitement.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Kappeler
Advertisement
Amid the rising fortunes of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in pre-election opinion polls, the party on Monday faced renewed scrutiny of its manifesto when a senior minister claimed its program flouts the Basic Law (German constitution).
Justice Minister Heiko Maas warned that the AfD's religious, family, criminal and European policies are in clear violation of Articles 1, 3, 4 and 23 of the charter.
Minaret ban singled out
He singled out a blanket ban on minarets - the towers on mosques from which the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer - which the anti-immigration, anti-Islam party has promised to introduce if it were to win the September 24 federal election.
#BeBoldGermany
05:02
This browser does not support the video element.
"Naturally, every religion must respect our constitutional order," Maas said in a guest article for the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. But he added that Germany's Basic Law permits "freedom of religion" and prohibits "discrimination on the grounds of faith or religious beliefs."
With just two weeks until the election, the AfD is polling between 8 and 11 percent, which could make it the third largest party after Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives and the Social Democrats.
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Leading members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have often made provocative, if not outright offensive, remarks — targeting refugees or evoking Nazi terminology.
Image: Britta Pedersen/dpa/picture alliance
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia first made headlines in 2017 for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. In July 2023, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by declaring that "This EU must die so that the true Europe may live." In 2019, a court ruled that it was not slanderous to describe Höcke as a fascist.
Image: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Alice Weidel
One of the best-known public faces of the AfD, party co-chair Alice Weidel rarely shies away from causing a row. Her belligerent rhetoric caused particular controversy in a Bundestag speech in 2018, when she declared, "burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state."
Image: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/picture-alliance
Maximilian Krah
Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, has called the EU a "vassal" of the US and wants to replace it with a "confederacy of fatherlands." He also wants to end support for Ukraine, and has warned on Twitter that immigration will lead to an "Umvolkung" of the German people — a Nazi-era term similar to the far-right's "great replacement" conspiracy theory.
Image: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images
Alexander Gauland
Former parliamentary party leader Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. He said Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
Image: Soeren Stache/dpa/picture-alliance
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
Harald Weyel
Not all of the AfD's scandals are about racism: Sometimes they are just revealing. Bundestag member Harald Weyel was caught in a scandal in September 2022 when a microphone he clearly didn't know was on caught him expressing his hope that Germany would suffer a "dramatic winter" of high energy prices or else "things will just go on as ever."
Image: Christoph Hardt /Future Image/imago images
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
8 images1 | 8
Maas warned that for the first time since 1949, a party was likely to clear what's known as the 5 percent hurdle to be represented in the Bundestag with an election manifesto that is partly unconstitutional.
In Germany's election, the electorate votes for a candidate (first vote) to represent their constituency and then a party (second vote).
The 5 percent hurdle has served to keep the far-right NPD and other extremist parties out of the German parliament until now.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor's office in a small central German city is considering levying charges against the AfD's top candidate Alexander Gauland for alleged incitement.
Farage rallies for the far-right AfD of Germany
01:14
This browser does not support the video element.
At a recent election event in Mühlhausen, in the state of Thuringia, Gauland hit out against Germany's Integration Minister Aydan Özoguz (SPD), suggesting that she needed to be "disposed of."
The prosecutor's office said it received several complaints after the party put up posters in southern Germany, again using the term "disposal" in reference to Özoguz.
On Sunday evening, the AfD candidate said that he knew nothing of an investigation. "I consider that completely misguided," he said.
The writer of the email argues that Germany's ruling class is allowing German society to be destroyed by a flood of "culturally incompatible people like Arabs, Sinti and Roma."
"These pigs," the email reads, in reference to Angela Merkel's government, "are nothing other than marionettes of the victorious powers of World War II."
The AfD has claimed that the email, which was published by the Welt am Sonntag newspaper, is a forgery, but the paper has said it received it from an acquaintance of Weidel who has sworn a legal oath that it is genuine.
In a filmed Internet appearance on Sunday evening, Weidel refused to comment upon the email, saying that was beneath her.
But when asked whether she would be willing to swear a similar legal oath that she was not the email's author, the AfD candidate did not take up that suggestion, saying only that the reporter "would see" what measures she would be taking in response.
@dwnews - AfD joins forces with Trump's former PR team
