German carmaker Volkswagen has said it wants a hall named after the company to be rechristened for a party conference by the far-right Alternative for Germany party. It also wants its company logo to be covered up.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/J. Stratenschulte
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The German auto giant Volkswagen on Wednesday urged the owners of the Volkswagen event hall in Braunschweig to cover up its company name during the November party conference of the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
A spokesman for the company — which doesn't own the hall but holds the naming rights to it — said it had asked the venue's operating company to cover its logo.
The firm said it wanted to adhere to the demands of employees who didn't want the firm associated with the event.
Volkswagen workers' council spokesman Heiko Lossie said members were clear in their condemnation of the AfD's nationalist stance.
"This party clearly stands against values of our group, such as respect, diversity, tolerance and partnership," Lossie said.
"We won't tolerate an AfD meeting in a hall that is visible as the 'Volkswagen Hall,'" Lossie added. "The name will have to vanish from the scene for the duration of the meeting."
Professional detachment
The operator of the hall — a subsidiary of the city administration — said that, as a public company, it was obliged to allow any political party to rent the venue provided it had not been banned.
"We don't have to like it in every case, but we have to be professional," the operator's chief executive Stephan Lemke told the city's Braunschweiger Zeitung daily newspaper.
Lemke did not say whether the company would comply with Volkswagen's request, saying the situation would have to be checked.
The venue, which opened in 2000, is a multi-purpose arena that serves home to the city's basketball team, which has Volkswagen Financial Services as its main sponsor.
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."
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.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
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The anti-immigration, anti-Islam AfD made strong gains in some parts of Germany in May's European elections, and is polling strongly in Saxony and Brandenburg ahead of state elections there in September.
