The former head of the populist Alternative for Germany party has appeared in court charged with perjury. Frauke Petry, who faces a possible prison sentence, declined to speak at the opening.
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German politician Frauke Petry maintained her silence on Monday as she faced accusations of lying about political campaign finances at an opening court hearing.
Petry's lawyer Carsten Brunzel told the court his client would not speak at this point, before calling for the charges to be cleared.
"The clarity of the law, the time elapsed and the obvious circumstances beg for this case to be stopped now at the latest," Brunzel said.
As the former head of the populist AFD, she was accused of making false statements to parliament while under oath.
The accusations relate to loans that AfD candidates in Saxony gave to the nationalist party in order to support its campaign in the eastern German state. The AfD was accused of pressuring candidates into loaning the money by threatening to deselect them from the 2015 state election.
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
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Petry admitted to making erroneous statements about the nature of loans made to her party during campaigning. However, the 43-year-old politician said she did not do so intentionally, claiming to have spoken in error because she "misremembered" the details.
Perjury can carry a sentence of at least a year in jail in Germany, or six months in minor cases.
Shift in allegiance
Petry condemned the case on Friday, saying it was politically motivated.
"The way this case has developed, it's a clear example of the way the Christian Democrats, the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel and the prosecutors linked to them have been trying for four years to hurt me as a person and a politician."
Petry remains a member of both Germany's national parliament where, as a directly elected representative, she holds her seat regardless of party loyalty. She is also a member of parliament in the state of Saxony.
Rather than representing the AfD in both legislatures, Petry sits as a member of the "national conservative" Blue Party, which she leads.
The court is expected to hear 27 witnesses and has scheduled court dates through March 13.
