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AfD top duo Weidel, Chrupalla
Photo:
Kay Nietfeld / picture alliance / dpa
These days, the AfD leadership is carefully looking south, behind the German border, to Austria.
For six months now, more and more refugees have been arriving there, mostly via the Balkan route.
This is good news for the AfD - although the party actually wants to keep migrants away from Germany.
But rising numbers of refugees could finally give her a campaign issue, one that the far right party, which prefers to raise the mood with scenarios of fear, understands.
In Austria, migration has long been the focus of domestic political struggles again. From the beginning of the year to the end of July, there were 16,300 "arrests of illegal migrants," according to the Ministry of the Interior in Vienna. In the entire corona year 2020 there were still 21,700 refugees. The conservative ÖVP under Chancellor Sebastian Kurz reacted quickly: The interior minister and the defense minister, both members of the ÖVP in the black-green government, recently announced a strengthening of the border guards. At the press conference of the two ministers, armed soldiers of the federal army and police officers stood in the background, and an armored green army vehicle was also shown in the pictures.
The martial staging was hopefully registered in the AfD headquarters in Berlin.
In 2015/2016, when around one million refugees came to Germany, the party successfully made the migration movement its core issue and warned against an alleged "Islamization" of Germany.
Flood and Corona do not move
In the summer of 2021, however, a few weeks before the federal election, the AfD is missing an election campaign hit with which it can address people beyond its core electorate. On Tuesday evening, the top candidate duo Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel will officially start the hot phase with a public rally in Schwerin. Before that, Chrupalla was a guest in the ARD's »summer interview«. So far, the right-wing extremist party has been barely noticeable in the election campaign. It almost seems as if the top has already come to terms with an average result.
As things stand today, big gains in the federal government are not to be expected.
Surveys see the AfD under its 2017 result (12.6 percent), in a corridor between nine and eleven percent.
The fear of the other parties of the AfD has subsided, and the party has not been able to benefit from the current issues.
The attention to the flood catastrophe in the west is decreasing again, parts of the party are on the side of the "lateral thinking" movement on the corona issue, but there is no uniform line.
An example: While honorary chairman Alexander Gauland, 80 years old, has long been vaccinated, as has co-party chairman Jörg Meuthen, Gauland's co-party leader Alice Weidel does not want to be vaccinated "for the foreseeable future".
In this situation, they hope in the AfD, rising migratory pressure could bring the party back on the offensive. After all, not only Austria is reporting growing numbers of refugees, more and more refugees are also crossing the border into Lithuania via Belarus. Migrants as leverage are the cynical revenge of the ruler Alexander Lukashenko against the EU, which recently imposed sanctions on his country for brutal actions against opposition members. In July, the Baltic EU country recorded more than 2000 illegal border crossings from Belarus by people from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq or African countries. In 2020 there were only 81.
Whether the calculation will work out to be able to score and mobilize with an increasing number of refugees by September 26th is also controversial internally. Domestically, the issue has been pushed back, they say. It is served in any case. For example, the AfD member of the Bundestag, Gottfried Curio, called for an "immediate program" to "restore law and order at the border" with a view to the migration figures.
The AfD also prefers to deal with itself shortly before the election. The clashes between the so-called moderate and radical sections of the party are a burden on the election campaign. In the largest state association in North Rhine-Westphalia, internal chat statements by state vice-president Matthias Helferich have been causing unrest for days. Last Monday, the federal executive unanimously applied to the responsible AfD regional arbitration court to impose a two-year ban on the 33-year-old lawyer from Dortmund. The reason: "significant violations" of the order and principles of the party and the resulting "loss of reputation and further damage" for the AfD.
In 2017, Helferich had written "the friendly face of the ns" under his photo in a Facebook chat, and he also confessed that he wanted to give "the democratic Freisler" at a "state congress" of the AfD.
NS stands for National Socialism, Roland Freisler, on the other hand, was President of the People's Court during the Nazi era and in this function was responsible for the deaths of more than 2,000 people.
Helferich now presents his comments as parody.
In the AfD it says: Whatever Helferich meant, his statements are now in the room and offer the political opponent ammunition.
Others, on the other hand, call for calm and serenity in the party.
The fight for Helferich could continue on Monday in the federal executive board.
Efforts are still being made to initiate formal exclusion proceedings against him, as Meuthen originally intended.
The co-party leader had ultimately failed because the two-thirds majority required for this was not achieved.
As it is said, six members of the twelve-member federal board - including Meuthen - were in favor of initiating an exclusion procedure.
However, six - among them the Meuthen opponents Chrupalla and Weidel - abstained.
Now it is checked internally whether the abstentions should have been counted at all.
If not, argues a part of the AfD, an exclusion procedure would also be in accordance with the statutes with six votes and should therefore be initiated at the regional arbitration court.
No matter how the conflict ends in the board, the AfD will probably not get rid of Helferich anytime soon. Long before the chat history became public, he was voted seventh on the North Rhine-Westphalian AfD state list in May. According to the latest polls, the fully qualified lawyer would still have a good chance of getting into the Bundestag for the first time.
