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Dispute over “angry speech” from party leader Meuthen once again reveals deep division in AfD, says Kai Küstner. The power struggle is likely to be even more bitter in the coming months.
A comment by Kai Küstner, ARD Capital studio, now Kalkar.
When a young child is good at self-interest, he will often be praised for his maturity. But when a political party cares more about itself than about the concerns of its constituents, it is mercilessly interpreted as childish behavior. This is exactly what the AfD feels, which is at the end of the poll.
And they still can’t get out of their still relatively young skin: like so many times this year, the party provided live and in front of the cameras clear proof that the AfD does not exist as a closed party. Divided practically in the middle, they actually exist twice: as an “alternative to Germany” and as an “alternative to the alternative”, so to speak.
Attack and counterattack
This became very clear in the debate on the “angry speech” of the head of AfD, Jörg Meuthen. Meuthen had the match rights, and that’s what he intended, initially caught off foot with his surprise attack on Day 1. The camp around right wing Björn Höcke took one night to come together. And then he returned to the counterattack on day 2.
What followed was a bitter and miraculous debate on the behavior of the party leader at the amusement park “Wunderland” in Kalkar. What one exhausted delegate finally summed up with the words: “Now that we have seized the opportunity for two hours to embarrass ourselves across Germany, I would ask for a 15 minute break.”
Divide into all relevant questions
The fact that this head-on clash between the two sides occurs in the AfD is not a coincidence, but it has almost the power of a law of nature. Because the rift that runs through the middle of the party has been dividing the AfD for years and is revealed on all relevant issues.
Take Corona, for example: while some take the virus seriously, others win favor with deniers and also want to harness the ire of so-called “side thinkers.” Take a pension, for example: in the neoliberal tradition, the Meuthen camp actually wants to depend entirely on private provision, while the Höcke camp doesn’t want to change the German welfare state or pension plan.
Some kind of 50/50 party
And, perhaps most importantly: while Meuthen wants to offer the protection of the Constitution as little attack surface as possible and sees the AfD as a “bourgeois party”, his opponents are based on the fundamental opposition and do not necessarily see the label “far right” is a flaw. In other words, the two camps basically want completely different matches. The fact that these two widely spread wings appear to be roughly equally strong – that is, the AfD is a sort of 50/50 match – doesn’t make things any easier.
In any case, in these circumstances it seems almost impossible to deceive the electorate into believing that the 2021 election year is going to close. And the party leader Meuthen? He likes to talk about the fact that he is a chess player who can anticipate his opponent’s moves. But to checkmate him politically, that’s what his opponents really should be working on. Whether this will be successful remains to be seen; for the moment it seems a stalemate. However, it cannot be overlooked that the AfD is caught in a kind of permanent game: against itself.
