The youth wing of the populist Alternative for Germany's (AfD) has handed out pepper spray to girls while election campaigning. The party claims the unusual election giveaways are to protect against animals, not people.
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The AfD's youth division "Junge Alternative" (JA), clearly thought pens or balloons were too boring, so instead they handed out pepper spray to young women while campaigning in the southwestern town of Bad Kreuznach.
Witnesses from the Greens and the Left party, who were also out on the campaign trail at the time, told local media that JA activists told some young women they could use the spray "to protect yourself against North Africans."
The right-wing populist party confirmed that it handed out 150 cans and stressed that the spray was to fend off animals and should only be used against people in "an absolute emergency," according to a JA spokesman. Handing out pepper spray with the sole purpose of using it against animals is not illegal in Germany.
"Legally our hands are tied," said Heike Kaster-Meurer, mayor of Bad Kreuznach. "But, of course, this is morally reprehensible."
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.
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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.
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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."
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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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Safety an issue
Nicole Höchst, the AfD parliamentary candidate for Bad Kreuznach defended the giveaways, saying they did not target minors and that the JA simply wanted to point to the precarious security situation in the town.
The JA's controversial gifts come after a night-time curfew was imposed in Bad Kreuznach's parks following repeated fights there between primarily Afghan men wielding knives and baseball bats.
On her Facebook page, Höchst, who is a teacher, said it was "unacceptable that the Greens put their morality above the law" in this case.
The AfD is no stranger to controversy, with Alexander Gauland at the forefront.Image: picture-alliance/dpa/R. Hirschberger
Others in the AfD clearly did not see what the fuss was about either. The regional AfD party in Saarland asked on its Facebook profile: "What's next? AfD is handing out non-halal jelly sweets to kids?"
Polls suggest the AfD could garner as much as 10 percent in the September 24 elections, which would put it in third place, right behind Germany's two main parties, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD).
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