Germany's far-right AfD has been forced to issue a statement admitting it falsely accused the Environment Ministry of donating millions to Hillary Clinton's election campaign. The claims were made by party board member.
Image: Reuters/F. Bensch
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A Berlin regional court on Monday ordered the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and its board member Georg Pazderski (pictured) to publicly retract false claims that the Federal Environment Ministry (BMU) donated millions of dollars to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016.
An AfD press release, authored by Pazderski and published in November 2016, stated that the BMU had "put several millions of taxpayers' money into the Clinton election campaign."
The court found that the AfD's "serious accusations" were not only false but also risked "jeopardizing public confidence" in the federal ministry. As well as misspending taxpayer money, the populist party also made groundless claims that the BMU intervened in the US election.
Europe's far right: Can the established parties stop them?
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BMU environment projects and the Clinton Foundation
The AfD's misleading claim was based on the fact that BMU had funded a climate protection project in eastern Africa as part of its International Climate Initiative (ICI). The project was being implemented by the Clinton Foundation.
The Foundation is also involved in a second ICI project in Africa. However, the ministry's decision to fund both projects was made back in 2013, long before the start of the 2016 US election campaign.
The BMU had already won a court order back in December 2016, forcing the AfD to remove the press release from its website. However, the populist party had so far refused to issue a retraction.
The defendants — AfD board member Pazderski and the federal party itself — were ordered to bear the costs of the lawsuit, although an appeal is still possible.
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.
