Far-right AfD congress prompts anti-racism protest
November 28, 2020
Germany's far-right political party is holding a two-day conference in a border town close to the Netherlands. Critics have blasted the decision after other parties delayed their conferences or held them online.
Image: Marcel Kusch/dpa/picture alliance
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Demonstrators protested against Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far-right political party, as it opened a party conference on Saturday.
The DPA news agency reported that some 500 anti-racist protesters had turned up to a march in the western town of Kalkar, close to the Dutch border.
They brandished placards that read "Hate is not an opinion" and "no room for Nazis."
The AfD rejects any comparison with the Nazis and describes itself as a nationalist and conservative party.
Stand up Against Racism spokesperson Jannik Berbalk said they had expected to be more than 1,000 people to rally, but blamed the cold weather for the low turnout.
He told AFP that the protesters "complied with all the conditions" with regards to coronavirus, saying the march was "peaceful."
The AfD is holding the conference to review its policies on retirement and basic income. The party also plans to make several internal appointments.
About 600 delegates were invited, despite the coronavirus pandemic.
Both protesters and AfD delegates worse masks during the demonstration and convention due to coronavirus restrictions.
Co-chair Tino Chrupalla opened the conference by attacking the German government's coronavirus policies.
He said livelihoods were being destroyed by the lockdown measures and that the wave of bankruptcies would continue.
He defended the decision to proceed with the face-to-face event, saying: "If we let ourselves be shut away by a virus, then democracy has already lost."
The party's other chair, Jörg Meuthen, used his speech to call for party discipline, and "irreproachable behavior of all officials and members, from those in parliament to those on the street."
He took aim at those in his party, including former co-chief Alexander Gauland, who talked about the government's "coronavirus dictatorship," and members who failed to distance themselves from anti-government groups that had caused unrest during demonstrations in some cities.
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Querdenken movement singled out
Meuthen referred to the Querdenken (Lateral Thinking) movement, in which right-wing demonstrators have played a prominent role. Querdenken protests have been held across Germany over recent months and have drawn conspiracy theorists and right-wing activists alongside coronavirus skeptics.
"This cannot and may not continue like this under any circumstances," said Meuthen, adding that the party needed to clarify the direction it was heading in or risk failure. Some responded to his speech with booing.
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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The AfD has grown rapidly since it was formed in 2013. It is now the biggest opposition party in the Bundestag national parliament, with 89 seats. Founded in 2013 as an anti-euro party, it has shifted its focus to immigration and Islam.
The party was a staunch critic of Chancellor Angela Merkel's migration policy in 2015, when she welcomed more than 1 million migrants into Germany.
