Senior members of Angela Merkel's CDU have criticized the "hate and incitement" circulated by the far-right AfD, saying it is partly to blame for the death of pro-immigration politician Walter Lübcke.
Lübcke, a member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) and a supporter of her refugee policies, was shot dead at his home earlier this month in what prosecutors believe to be a "right-wing extremist" attack.
CDU party leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said Lübcke's murder shows how the AfD's use of "hate and incitement" has overturned taboos in language and "lowered inhibitions so much that they result in pure violence."
Right-wing populism poses "a great danger to every nation," Kramp-Karrenbauer said in Paris, but "looking at our particularly special history in Germany, it's an even greater challenge for us."
Her comments followed controversial remarks from former CDU General Secretary Peter Tauber. He called out specific AfD politicians as being "complicit" in Lübcke's murder due to their rhetoric. He also argued that those who oppose Germany's constitution should have certain fundamental rights revoked, including the right to free assembly.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel also warned against using an aggressive tone in discussions, saying it could promote violence. Speaking with students in the town of Goslar, Merkel encouraged debate, but she added that people should be "respectful in their choice of language."
AfD enraged over remarks
The remarks from prominent CDU members sparked criticism among AfD leaders and supporters, who accused them of attempting to politicize Lübcke's death.
"It's Mrs. Kramp-Karrenbauer and Mr. Tauber who seem disinhibited," Alice Weidel, one of the party's parliamentary leaders, wrote on Twitter, saying they were "using a murder to discredit political rivals."
Politician's killing an 'alarm bell' for Germany
02:05
This browser does not support the video element.
AfD co-leader Jörg Meuthen particularly condemned Tauber's comments, which were published in a guest column for the daily Die Welt, and called for him to be removed from his current post as a parliamentary deputy minister in the Defense Ministry.
"It is repulsive and evil as it is wrong," Meuthen told news agency DPA.
The AfD is the first far-right party to enter Germany's parliament since World War II and currently leads the opposition as the country's third-largest party. Several of senior AfD members have been criticized for their remarks on Germany's culture of remembrance of the Holocaust and grew their popularity with an anti-immigration platform.
Lübcke was found dead at his home on June 2 in what appeared to be an execution-style assassination. Authorities are currently investigating whether the suspect currently in custody acted alone.
If prosecutors find that his murder was politically motivated, it would be the first assassination of a sitting German politician since the 1970s.
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.
