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AfD flags (symbolic picture): Rolf Kahnt wants to stay as a non-party member of the Hessian state parliament
Photo: Daniel Karmann / dpa
More than half a year after his exclusion from the AfD parliamentary group of the Hessian state parliament, the member of parliament Rolf Kahnt resigned from the party.
The 76-year-old justified his decision with "increasingly right-wing extremist developments of the AfD at federal and state level".
For the time being, he remains non-party and non-attached MP.
Kahnt joined the AfD in 2013, and the politician from the Bergstrasse district in southern Hesse has been in the Wiesbaden state parliament since 2018. There was a public dispute last year between Kahnt and the AfD MP Rainer Rahn on the one hand and the party's parliamentary group on the other. Rahn had accused the parliamentary group executive that he and Kahnt had been spied on with "Stasi methods". The AfD parliamentary group accused the two MPs of "uncooperative behavior" and excluded Kahnt from the parliamentary group.
According to information from the AFP news agency, AfD state spokesman Klaus Herrmann said that Kahnt's exit was "not surprising, but a logical consequence."
Kahnt reacted to the rejection of the AfD by the other parliamentary groups "by increasingly trying to please them, regardless of the AfD's political positions."
AfD state spokesman Robert Lambrou added: "It was not the AfD Hessen that radicalized, but Rolf Kahnt in his desire to be socially liked in response to the rejection by the old parties."
This culminated "in a form of egocentrism that the parliamentary group could no longer accept."
The opposites "could not be cemented in the end".
ime / AFP / dpa