A new Bundestag will be elected in less than two months.
Shortly before the election, a former AfD employee speaks up - and warns of his former party.
Berlin - Two months before the general election, the author and former AfD employee Christian Hirsch warned strongly against the party.
When he hired the AfD parliamentary group in Brandenburg in 2015, he believed that “the undemocratic fringes would eventually move away” and that the AfD would develop into a bourgeois party, said Hirsch on Tuesday in Berlin.
This was a misjudgment.
The “Völkische and the systemic revolutionaries”, who had come together in the now formally dissolved “wing” of the AfD, had “systematically subverted” the party. It is wrong to accuse the AfD of forgetting history. “Many members of the AfD system are historically competent, know the history of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich very well, sometimes even better than their opponents. They just draw other lessons from history, ”it says in one of“ 20 theses from the engine room of the AfD system ”that Hirsch has now presented.
Last April, Hirsch published a grotesque roman clef under the pseudonym Ferdinand Schwanenburg with the title “Seizure of Power”. The dystopia tells of the rise of the "Germany Party". "I realized relatively quickly that I was not right here," the author told the German Press Agency about his time with the AfD. Today he says that the publication of the novel was his way of "repenting" for his work in the service of the AfD.
The central figure in the "seizure of power" is a ruthless, folk-thinking former sergeant. He uses bourgeois-looking politicians to build a harmless facade behind which he pursues his plan to establish a leadership state. The “party-internal informant system” that he experienced in the AfD is described in reality as “even worse than in the novel”.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution observes the "wing" founded in 2015 by the Thuringian AfD country chief Björn Höcke as a certain right-wing extremist tendency. The domestic secret service assumes that the right wing movement will continue as a network. A possible classification of the entire party as a suspected right-wing extremist case is currently the subject of a legal dispute between the party and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. An observation of the entire AfD would be correct, said Hirsch. It would, however, help “to consolidate the power of the systemicists within the party”. dpa