The Free Democrats touted its education policy with an ad on Twitter that featured a man fixing mispelled far left and right slogans. Critics slammed FDP for being tone deaf and trivializing Nazi slogans.
Image: Twitter/FDP
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Germany's Free Democrats (FDP) were criticized on social media on Thursday for an advertisement that featured a salute used by the Nazis "Sieg Heil" (hail to victory) as part of a video intended to highlight their education policies.
The ad, pegged to the hashtag #Orthograffiti, features a man with a blurred face going around a city fixing the spelling of various graffiti slogans.
The video featured phrases from the far left, such as "f**k the police" and "anarchy," and slogans from the far-right that denigrate refugees, such as the English phrase "refugees not welcome."
But the ad also included the controversial slogan "Sieg Heil,” which in the video is misspelled as "Sieg Hail."
"The more crude political debates in the country become, the clearer it becomes for us Liberals: Education has never been more important as it is today. That is why we champion this #Orthograffiti campaign, for a better education policy," the Tweet read.
At the end of the video, FDP elaborated on the message, saying "Education is the answer. This not only applies to spelling, but also against extremism, vandalism and violence. With good education, we also want to ensure, as the film shows, that we finally vanish misanthropic graffiti from our cities."
Too trivialized?
Hours after the video was posted, it became the number one trending topic on Twitter in Germany and received thousands of comments. Most of the comments were critical, denouncing what they saw as the ad's trivialization of Nazi and far-right language.
The backlash to the ad comes just two weeks after a man in the city of Halle killed two people outside a synagogue in an anti-Semitic rampage. The attack led to a wider discussion among politicians and the media over the specter of far-right nationalism and rising anti-Semitism in the country.
German Jewish Comedian Shahak Shapira hit back at the ironic ad with his own irony. "Even if Germany lurches back into a genocidal rightwing dictatorship, the courageous @FDP will at least make sure that we all spell 'Sieg Heil' correctly," Shapira wrote.
ZDF broadcaster TV moderator Dunja Hayali went as far as saying the phrase should disappear. "Could we democrats continue to make sure that 'Sieg Heil' finally disappears from our minds! Then no one would have to know how to spell it right anymore," she wrote.
Extra 3, a political comedy show, responded to the FDP with a video of an elderly woman known for going around her city defacing far-right and Nazi symbols on the street.
But the Liberals defended their ad on Twitter, saying the video was meant to be ironic and reinforcing the notion that the party was against far-right symbols, while insisting that education was still the answer to the critic's complaints.
As of this summer, the FDP had drawn 8% of potential voters, coming in behind the Greens, Angela Merkel's CDU, the far-right AfD and the Social Democrats (SPD).
The Liberals have campaigned as a rightwing alternative to both the far-right and the center-right, focusing on lowering taxes and greater EU integration. But they have also been against open borders and advocating for an "orderly system" that favors skilled migration.
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.
