A Berlin court has upheld a nearly €270,000 fine levied against the AfD for accepting illegally funded campaign promotions in 2016. The party's co-chief, Jörg Meuthen, said it was a mistake due to his "inexperience."
Image: Reuters/A. Hilse
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A Berlin administrative court Thursday ruled against an appeal by Germany's right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in a campaign donation scandal involving its co-chairman, Jörg Meuthen.
Germany's parliament, the Bundestag, slapped a €269,400 ($296,000) fine on the AfD over €89,800 worth of advertising from a Swiss public relations agency for Meuthen's 2016 state election campaign in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg. The fine equals three times the value of the promotional work.
The Bundestag had ruled that the free posters, flyers and newspaper ads produced by the Swiss firm, Goal AG, amounted to an illegal donation because the AfD failed to identify the source of the funding for the promotions.
German parties and candidates are not permitted to receive donations from non-EU entities, and before accepting the offer, Meuthen needed to make sure where the funding for the work had come from.
Pleading ignorance
On Thursday, Meuthen said at the time he "never had the slightest reason to believe" that could he have acted unlawfully.
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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When Meuthen was asked if he had been aware of the ads and posters that Goal AG had produced on his behalf, he replied that he "hadn't noticed that much" and that the firm's chief, Alexander Segert, was a close friend who had simply done him a favor.
"Alexander made a few posters there, how nice of Alexander," Meuthen said he thought at the time, adding that the campaign had been run "casually" and was not "professionally organized."
Administrative court president Erna Xalter said that Meuthen's position at the time as the AfD's representative in Baden-Württemberg meant that he must have recognized that the support was illegal, adding that he simply could have asked his friend where the money for the campaign was coming from.
The AfD argued that the promotions were not donations to the party, because the posters were of Meuthen and therefore of a personal nature.
However, the court said that the posters clearly advocated the AfD as a whole and featured the party's logo and website address.
More Swiss trouble for the AfD
Two other AfD politicians are also facing potential fines for campaign contributions originating in Switzerland. Guido Reil, who currently represents the AfD in the European Parliament, also accepted pro-bono promotions from Goal AG during a campaign in 2017.
AfD leader Alice Weidel could also be fined around €396,000 for receiving nearly €130,000 in donations from a Swiss pharmacy concern. Weidel's constituency office returned the money several months after receiving it amid doubts about its legality.
According to the German press agency DPA, the AfD has allocated around €1 million to deal with its donation scandals.
