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Jörg Meuthen speaks. What he says seems like an impact on the Kalkar showroom. The co-partisan leader explains his party’s appearance, more thoroughly than almost any AfD politician before.
It’s a surprising surcharge at the start of the two-day party congress where a pension concept is supposed to be adopted.
On the board seats, television cameras show the honorary president of the AfD, Alexander Gauland. Gauland once headed the AfD along with Meuthen, today they are divided since Jörg Meuthen claimed that Brandenburg AfD politician and far right Andreas Kalbitz lost their membership by a board decision in May.
This Saturday, Gauland can be seen on the television monitor, as he only occasionally claps during Meuthen’s speech. Because what the party leader says is a kind of general accounting with his own party. The AfD has reached a point “where it no longer automatically rises and electoral success follows electoral success.”
It is the introduction to a concert that many did not expect.
Because Meuthen goes to court with just about everything the AfD has made a name for in recent weeks: with criticism of Corona’s policy, with the admission of right-wing bloggers to the Bundestag through two members of the AfD of the Bundestag, with contacts for »Lateral Thinkers” movement of critics of the protective measures of the crown “.
His criticism, although he does not name him, is also directed at Gauland, who repeatedly refers to Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in his speeches in the Bundestag and in the party and recently spoke of the “dictatorship of the Crown” in the Bundestag. It is not enough to assure each other that they are conservative. “Some in our ranks seem to understand that this goes back to yesterday, they feel at home with Bismarck and enthusiastically adore this historical figure,” Meuthen says.
These AfD politicians propagated a kind of »Bismarck 21« as a solution to the current economic and socio-political problems of the country. With the recipes of “the day before yesterday, tomorrow’s political solutions cannot be designed, especially in view of the tremendous dynamism of a living and working world that is digitizing at breakneck speed,” Meuthen shouts. The AfD “is not a backward party and it shouldn’t be.”
So it continues in Meuthen’s speech. Meuthen clarifies the appearances of bloggers from the right-wing scene, who recently harassed other parliamentarians in the Bundestag before the vote on the amended Infection Protection Act and had access through two members of the AfD of the Bundestag, whose behavior it was later disapproved of by the parliamentary group.
“We prefer to leave those in the rain,” he says, “who are very happy to fight and roll, or invite others to join them, as they did last week in the Bundestag, because they like themselves in the role of provocateurs like pubescent schoolboys, especially those wanting to show their own manageable bubble how big they are. “
Those people should be denied the “hypocritically demanded unity”, because of such incidents “crowds of people” no longer voted for the AfD. “We will not achieve more success by appearing more and more aggressive, more and more crude, more and more uninhibited,” wrote Meuthen in the party’s studbook.
The AfD, according to Meuthen, needs discipline. This includes “impeccable behavior by all officials and also ordinary members, from parliament to street stalls.” Finally, Meuthen criticizes the rhetoric in his own ranks. Meuthen asks whether it is really wise to speak of a “Crown dictatorship” in parliament, also indirectly pointing to Gauland. “We do not live in a dictatorship, otherwise we could hardly hold this party conference today,” Meuthen replied.
Meuthen rhetorically questions AfD politicians who recently participated in the rallies of Corona critics and whether it would be prudent if “all kinds of AfD officials without any critical distance joined forces with the movement of so-called” lateral thinkers “without critics”. Deniers were seen. In addition to completely normal concerned citizens, there were also “not very few contemporaries whose strange positions and views, sometimes outright hostile to the system, suggest that, tragically, direct thinking does not even work properly for them, much less lateral thinking. genuine”.
At that moment there is applause, but among the delegates the delegates can also be seen on the television monitor, keeping their hands down and shaking their heads. Meuthen goes even further, basically picking up the speeches of AfD members of the Bundestag who compared the Infection Protection Act with the Hitler government’s Enabling Act of 1933, which opened the doors to the self-empowerment of parliament and the Nazi dictatorship .
Would it be wise, Meuthen asks delegates, “to address the deliberate use of the term Enabling Act in connection with the change in the Infection Protection Act, which of course is heavily criticized and therefore deliberately raises associations with the was Nazi and Hitler’s rise to power in 1933?
Shouldn’t, Meuthen asks, such implicit comparisons in view of “the generally known monstrosity and, in this dimension, also the uniqueness of Nazi barbarism, should they not be forbidden, because they implicitly trivialize the hideous crimes of that dark age?”
Meuthen paints a grim setting for his party. “Either we hit the corner here, and very determined and very soon, or we as a party will experience a major failure by no means in the distant future,” he said in the showroom.
After Meuthen’s speech, Gauland was asked about the speech on the Phoenix television station. At first he called it “mixed”, it contained good parts, but there are also “parts that I consider divisive”. Gauland defends himself against his attacks on the parliamentary group, Meuthen does not have to interfere. “I bow too low to the protection of the constitution,” Gauland said.
The fact that Meuthen criticized the choice of words of the “dictatorship of the Crown” and thus Gauland, who had used this term in the Bundestag, is taken up by the leader of the parliamentary group. One could argue about it, but it would be “ridiculous” if, using the term, it was assumed that he was calling into question the constitutional order. There is a risk of clashes within the party in the camps. Gauland also turns against what in his view is too radical a critique of the “lateral thinkers” movement.
I would have expected a call for unity from the AfD. The speech “offended a lot of people in the hall.” Meuthen’s speech sounded like “one group had to prevail over the other”, which he believed was wrong.
Weidel interrupts interview with Phoenix
The leader of the co-parliamentary group Alice Weidel, also an opponent of Meuthen, then told Phoenix that the speech “should not be hung up too much.” The Kalbitz issue had been decided by the board of directors. When Weidel is confronted by the moderator with an outside quote about AfD social policy during the interview, according to which he is “social-nationalist”, Weidel eventually interrupts the conversation and leaves. He appreciates the moderator, but considers the question “doubtful”, insinuates that the moderator said he had said “National Socialist”, which the latter in turn denies. Have a “nice day,” says Weidel and leaves the room. It’s not the first time that the group’s co-leader has canceled a television appearance.
Unrest among delegates
When Meuthen had finished his speech, a delegate was seen yelling angrily, walking through the lines without a mask and evidently leaving the room. The tension could also be seen in other places. Baden-Württemberg AfD politician Dubravko Mandic, who is far to the right, asked to exclude the media from the room, due to photos of some delegates not wearing masks and associated negative images in the media. But the request was rejected by a large majority. Mandic also belongs to a group of applicants who want to reprimand Meuthen, indirectly because of the measures against Kalbitz (read the details here).
The party congress in Kalkar is held under the strictest hygiene rules, delegates, if unable to present a medical certificate, must also wear the masks on the spot, an AfD complaint against this was rejected on Friday by the Higher Administrative Court of Münster. Kalkar Ordnungsamt employees check compliance with regulations on site; Anyone who does not comply must leave the showroom.
By noon, the AfD had counted 507 of the 600 expected delegates.
Editor’s note: Due to the situation of the crown, the SPIEGEL reporter is not following the party congress on the site, but in front of the TV screen and on the live broadcast.
