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AfD parliamentary group on October 26, 2021 in the Bundestag: Some of the MPs sat in the stands
Photo: ODD ANDERSEN / AFP
Joachim Wundrak still has to find his way around the hallways of the Reichstag building. The Lieutenant General a. D. The Luftwaffe entered the Bundestag for the first time for the AfD. In front of a makeshift coffee stand in one of the aisles, the man from Lower Saxony happened to meet Paul Ziemiak, the CDU general secretary. Both do not know each other, a journalist introduces them to each other. "I hope you have no reservations," says Wundrak from behind his protective mask and offers Ziemiak his hand. The CDU politician strikes briefly, they exchange a few words, then Ziemiak leaves.
For the 66-year-old Wundrak, this encounter on the day on which the newly elected parliament meets for the first time is a omen. He will have a hard time here as a representative of the AfD. The other democratic parliamentary groups in the new Bundestag want to have as little as possible to do with a party that has become increasingly radicalized in recent years and in which four state associations are now classified by the state constitutional protection authorities as suspected right-wing extremist cases. "I hope for normal intercourse," says Wundrak.
But there will probably not be that in the 20th legislative period either.
Even in the run-up to the constituent meeting, the FDP had announced that it would no longer want to sit next to the AfD in the future.
So far, the AfD sits on the far right of the podium of the Bundestag presidium, followed by the FDP, then the Union, the Greens, the SPD and on the left the left-wing parliamentary group.
It remains to be seen whether the Union parties will still have to swap with the Liberals and take a seat next to the AfD.
AfD holds on to presidium candidates
The new seating arrangements for the AfD would not really change anything. It remains isolated in the House on the far right. When the parliamentary group sent the candidate Michael Kaufmann into the running for the office of Bundestag Vice President on Tuesday afternoon, he promptly failed. Just like six AfD candidates for this post in the last legislative period.
Even in the AfD, hardly anyone had expected Kaufmann's election before the election, even if he had previously held the post of Vice President in the Thuringian state parliament and even once Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow from the Left gave him his vote. Even the fact that Kaufmann had carefully distanced himself from the nationalist Thuringian AfD country chief Björn Höcke at the lecture in front of journalists is of no use to him. In the first ballot, Kaufmann received only 118 votes and thus clearly missed the required majority of 369 votes.
For the time being, the AfD should not be able to fill the deputy post in the Bundestag Presidium to which it is actually entitled according to the rules of procedure.
After all, the MPs are free to choose not to vote for a candidate they do not like.
The AfD parliamentary group still wants to hold on to Kaufmann and probably send him to two more rounds of voting.
As is often the case in the past four years, the AfD is all about maximum attention on the day of its constitution.
This had already become apparent in the past 48 hours, when the first rumors were circulating that several AfD parliamentarians wanted to take a stand against the 3G rule that was in force on that day.
Only those who have recovered, have been vaccinated or tested are allowed to sit in the parliamentary seats; those who cannot provide appropriate evidence have to move to the stands.
They make ample use of this at the AfD. Of the 82 AfD parliamentarians, 23 went to the stands on this day, which is located directly above their parliamentary group. So that they can still actively participate in the action from above, there is a microphone, and voting tables are also provided for the presidium ballots. At the very front is Karsten Hilse, who recently attracted attention at demonstrations by critics of the corona measures and corona deniers. That day he put a button on his lapel: “Unvaccinated. Control group of the experiment «is written on it.
Downstairs in the plenum, the new and old parliamentary group leader Alice Weidel sits alone at a single table.
Because her co-parliamentary group leader Tino Chrupalla has to stay away from the event - he was infected with the corona virus shortly before the meeting and went into isolation.
Attention through requests
Until the election of the new Bundestag President Bärbel Bas from the SPD, the AfD succeeds in keeping the other parties busy. Right at the beginning, she made a series of applications, all of which failed - for example, with the attempt to get 80-year-old Alexander Gauland through as age president. Because of the AfD, the other parliamentary groups only changed the rules of procedure in the last legislative period so that it was no longer the oldest member of the parliament, but the longest serving member - which in this case is the outgoing Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble of the CDU.
Other motions also fall through, for example to lower the number of votes for a candidate for election or against the use of gender-sensitive language in legal texts that has not yet been used - a typical AfD excitement for a topic that is not pending at all. "This is the plenary hall of the Bundestag, not the playground for your propaganda," calls out the parliamentary manager of the CSU regional group, Stefan Müller, to the AfD MPs.
How the AfD acts in the Bundestag is also shown by the appearance of the Thuringian AfD member and party index Stephan Brandner, who belongs to the extreme right of the party. He carried out the motion to lower the quorum for a candidate for election by a candidate for chancellor with a sentence from former SPD politician Willy Brandt, which he had used in his inaugural speech in 1969 as Chancellor of the social-liberal coalition: "Dare to do more democracy."
A provocation by the lawyer that works in the end. Because when the left-wing politician Jan Korte rejects the appropriation of Brandt, a man who was a resistance fighter against the Nazis and who kneeled as Chancellor in front of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial, there is thunderous applause from almost all MPs except those of the AfD. Korte, visibly excited, also remarked in a subordinate clause that this came "of all people" from a party "that was in the tradition of the Nazis."
For a brief moment there are tumultuous scenes among the AfD MPs, Hilse goes ahead in the stands and yells something down into the plenum.
A little later, after an intervention by the AfD, Schäuble Korte will point out, as the senior president, that in the past legislative period, cross-faction groups had agreed not to accuse each other of National Socialism.
He appealed to continue this practice in the future.
The first day of the new parliament on AfD comes to an end like meetings in the past.
There will be no new normal in dealing with the right in this electoral term.
This also applies to extra-parliamentary activities.
Because of the AfD, the parliamentary soccer team "FC Bundestag" had changed its statutes in the last legislative period, in which "cosmopolitanism" and "tolerance" are advertised and one is "clearly against any form of nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobic endeavors" turns.
This is probably why the number of AfD players remained manageable in the past.
Recently, only Jörn König from the AfD has played, who is "ok", as one member says.
König will probably stay on the ball, he made it back into the Bundestag.
He is, jokes a FC Bundestag player, "as an AfDler in football, of all things, a left-footed man."
But actually "we should, from a political point of view, use him as a right-wing winger."
