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Status: 09/22/2020 7:45 PM – NDR 1 Lower Saxony
The three MPs Jens Ahrends, Stefan Wirtz and Dana Guth (from left) announced their departure from the AfD parliamentary group on Tuesday. (Screenshot)
The AfD parliamentary group in the Lower Saxony state parliament has been dissolved. Former group leader Dana Guth and MPs Stefan Wirtz and Jens Ahrends announced their departure from the group on Tuesday afternoon in Hannover. The AfD loses its status as a parliamentary group in the state parliament because the remaining six members represent less than five percent of the state parliament.
VIDEO: Guth: “Cooperation is no longer possible” (1 min)
Founding a new parliamentary group?
“The three of us decided today, after the events of the last ten days, to leave the parliamentary group,” Guth said, but that doesn’t have to be the end of the AfD in the state parliament. The three politicians apparently want to stay in the party and Guth wants to try to found a new AfD parliamentary group, a bourgeois-conservative, as she put it. You made an offer to four deputies.
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Guth, Kestner and the “wing”
The faction split came a day after the postponement of the new AfD faction head election, for which Guth actually wanted to run again. The escalation is apparently related to the election of the board of directors. new state president Jens Kestner. He is close to the controversial Björn Höcke, and thus to the formally disbanded völkisch-nationalist “wing” of the party. In the AfD of Lower Saxony, there has been a power struggle between moderate and more radical forces in the party for a long time. Kestner had replaced Guth at the head of the state party.
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“Disappointed and stunned”
The remaining six members of the parliamentary group made a statement on Tuesday: They would have taken notice of the resignation, disappointed and stunned. From their point of view, the behavior is incomprehensible and irresponsible. Florian Finkbeiner of the Göttingen Institute for Democracy Research said in the NDR regional magazine Hallo Niedersachsen that trench warfare within the party is obviously happening. “The struggles for power have intensified and Dana Guth has failed to unite the party,” Finkbeiner said.
AfD 2017 for the first time in the state parliament
The AfD entered parliament in Hannover for the first time in the 2017 state elections with a result of 6.2 percent. The loss of the strength of the parliamentary group means that the AfD will in the future have fewer parliamentary rights in the state parliament, for example in the case of bills and issues important to the state government. The party has already made headlines in various state parliaments after discussions and discussions. In Baden-Württemberg and last year in Bremen the parliamentary groups were dissolved, in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania some of the deputies separated.
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