Anti-fascist protesters led opposition against the co-founder of the right-wing AfD party as he returned to work at Hamburg University. Following shouts of "Nazi pig," Bernd Lucke was forced to give up on his lecture.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Scholz
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Protests disrupted classes at Hamburg University on Wednesday as the co-founder of right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) returned to teaching for the first time in five years.
Lucke was escorted into the building, where he was supposed to lecture on macroeconomics, by police.
Students shouted "Nazi pig" and "Get lost" as Lucke entered the lecture hall. Eventually, the economics professor was forced to give up on his attempt to lecture and leave the building.
Students were not the only ones who joined in the protest: protest group "Omas gegen Rechts" ("Grandmothers against the right") were also present, armed with specially-designed umbrellas.
The AfD, which became the third-biggest party in the German Bundestag in 2017, is euroskeptic and has been facing criticism for its stance on immigration policy and Islam.
Omas Gegen Rechts protest Bernd LuckeImage: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Scholz
Economist who immediately lost control of AfD's direction
Lucke is a professor of economics at the northern German university, but he gave up his teaching role in 2013 when he formed the right-wing political party, along with current leader Alexander Gauland.
An economics professor whose euroskepticism was based on objections to the single currency, concerns on the EU's sovereign debt difficulties, and more technical aspects of EU membership, Lucke was highly critical of the party's rapid shift to the right and its increasing focus on issues like immigration. Following a dispute with then-leader Frauke Petry, Lucke left the AfD in 2015, some two years after forming it. He has since denounced various AfD policies and set up the less extreme Liberal Conservative Reform party, which has so far failed to win any seats in German elections.
It is unknown if Lucke will attempt to continue teaching as the semester continues.
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.
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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."
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.
