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Christian Lüth had been silent in recent days and did not respond to questions from the media. Now the 43-year-old is trying to find an explanation for his inhumane remarks that made headlines earlier in the week, nationally and even globally.
The former spokesman for the AfD parliamentary group was secretly filmed for a documentary on the Pro Sieben television station about right-wing extremism in Germany, while speaking to a blogger from the right-wing scene with his contacts with the leader of the parliamentary group from AfD, Alexander Gauland, in a Berlin bar. boasts and, among other things, rants that migrants can be “shot” or “gassed”. And: “The worse it is for Germany, the better for the AfD (read here in detail the background and the statements).
Lüth’s name was not mentioned in the film, but it was revealed by “Zeit” at the beginning of the week before the show’s broadcast.
In a written statement that SPIEGEL has, Lüth initially admits that he is the man in the Pro Sieben images. He writes, and at the same time tries to put things in perspective: “In this conversation there were horrible and inexcusable comments that were characterized by a heated, ironic and exaggerated choice of words.”
What exactly did Lüth say? Among other things:
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“We discussed it for a long time with Gauland: the worse Germany is, the better for the AfD (…). If everything went well now (…), the AfD would be three percent. We don’t want to. That’s why we have to think of a tactic. “
Lüth’s interlocutor asks once:
Lüth responds:
Lüth now claims in his statement that those who know him best know that these statements do not correspond to his “convictions”. Lüth, who belonged to the FDP before starting to work for the AfD in 2013, also claimed that he grew up in Latin America, lived there for almost 20 years, worked in Cairo for a long time, and came into contact with “many different cultures.” .
He has a liberal background and therefore “is not only firmly convinced that all countries, including Germany, need migration”, but only “controlled and across secure borders”. That is why he rejects the accusations of being “right-wing extremist or extreme right-wing extremist, xenophobic or hostile to migrants.”
It also claims that neither the parliamentary group nor the party executive had knowledge of the content “of this conversation until the time of the report” nor “the content had been discussed in any way beforehand.” With this you want to protect your sponsor Gauland in particular.
The statement will probably not allow Lüth to return to the AfD parliamentary group. As SPIEGEL learned from circles, the unannounced termination, decided by the parliamentary group on Monday and then approved by the parliamentary group, took place in recent days.
This is not the first time that Lüth has made headlines with a possible lack of distance from National Socialism.
In the spring he was granted a leave of absence from Gauland as spokesman for the parliamentary group. Because before, among other things, there had been screenshots of a message exchange between Lüth and a woman, where the spokesperson at that time described himself as “fascist” and referred to the “Aryan” ancestry of his alleged grandfather.
Lüth had survived all personnel and management changes in the AfD since 2013.
The AfD parliamentary group did not announce until mid-September that Lüth would “take on another task within the parliamentary group.” Shortly before, the SPIEGEL had reported that Lüth should be given the position of “media coordinator” in the press office, which, however, was observed with astonishment in some parts of the parliamentary group, as the executive committee of the parliamentary group he had not yet decided on its use.
