The top Social Democrat in Germany's Bundestag has called a regional Alternative for Germany leader a "Nazi." In January, Björn Höcke said he thought Germany paid too much reverence to victims of the Holocaust.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/M. Schutt
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The chairman of the Social Democrats (SPD) in Germany's parliament on Saturday doubled down on his assertion that Björn Höcke, the disgraced Thuringia state parliamentarian for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), is a "Nazi."
Thomas Oppermann's remark came specifically in response to the AfD state speaker's statements that criticized Germany's commemoration of its Holocaust crimes. However, Höcke and other members of the AfD have also consistently made outrageous statements about refugees and Germans of color.
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.
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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."
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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."
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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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"For me, Björn Höcke is a Nazi," Oppermann said at Saturday's meeting of the SPD's state delegates in Thuringia. "Someone who wants to resuscitate the ethnic ideology of the National Socialists has no place in a democratic society."
Oppermann said Germany could no longer tolerate discrimination based on gender, religion, national origin or heritage. "Someone who does not observe this ground rule of democracy has no business in the Bundestag," he said.
'A 180-degree reversal'
"These stupid politics of coming to grips with the past cripple us," Höcke told the AfD's youth wing in January. "We need nothing other than a 180-degree reversal on the politics of remembrance." Referring to Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, he added: "We Germans, that is to say, our people, are the only people in the world who have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital."
After AfD leaders initiated proceedings to expel Höcke from the party, he attempted to backpedal on his statements. Speaking at a Thuringia state meeting of the AfD last week, Höcke said he had made a "mistake" and taken the wrong tone with what is a very serious subject.
The AfD had nicked voters from both the center-right and Oppermann's own center-left SPD, but the German public's taste seems to have turned a bit following Höcke's disparaging of the commemoration of the nation's mass murders. The SPD has now overtaken German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, 32 percent to 31, in polls ahead of September's elections,and the AfD is third, with 11 percent - a number that once would have been unthinkable for a far-right party.
The diverse city of Cologne is bracing for massive protests ahead of the AfD's planned party congress in April. The willingness of the Maritim Hotels group to host the event and other AfD meetings has led to nationwide calls for boycotts.
