"The opponent": This 85-year-old is the most uncomfortable politician in the district of Ebersberg

Like a tack on a velvet sofa, someone sits in the district council who makes life difficult for the rest of politics. AfD district councillor Manfred Schmidt (85) bombards authorities from the municipality to the EU with applications and complaints. A visit to someone that causes a lot of trouble – and sometimes movement.

Baldham/Ebersberg – The other day they wiped out the old AfD Schmidt. When he went to bieseln during a committee meeting, the other county councillors voted on his motion before he was back in the hall. It was about whether the district office should be allowed to set aside money for free disposal in its departments. A gourmet theme. Manfred Schmidt would have liked to have made the big speech he loves so much. Then he reads his text from the page, over all the interjections, as if his hearing aid were defective. Actually, it is good manners in the Ebersberg district council to leave the first word to the applicant. And actually, it is not appropriate to use the urge to urinate of an 85-year-old politically against him.

27 years of the CSU - then came the resignation

In the case of Manfred Schmidt, AfD district councillor from Baldham, things are different. Instead of indignation, the missed vote caused amused smiles in the other groups. What almost went unnoticed: Schmidt's request got approval, something that almost never happens to the AfD council and suggests that he was right with his complaint. That the budget practice of the official departments was flawed.

He has earned the cross-party, quasi-unanimous dislike that Schmidt encounters from the Greens to the CSU/FDP. When the Baldhamer was thrown out of the Vaterstetten municipal council in the 2020 local elections after four terms in office, the joke circulated that the town hall would save itself an entire staff position – the retired civil servant had flooded the administration with countless inquiries and applications over the years. Very few with usable results. He was a member of the CSU for 27 years, and as a dissatisfied person with the issue of migration, he co-founded the Vaterstetten local group of the right-wing conservative Free Citizens' Union, which he later merged with the AfD.

Election scandal: AfD candidates against their will

An election scandal is likely to have cost him the mandate: Several of his recruited list candidates for the district council and municipal council publicly declared that they had unknowingly and against their will run for the AfD. Schmidt had deliberately deceived and duped them. Against the AfD man, therefore, a party exclusion procedure is still ongoing. He survived investigations by the public prosecutor's office without legal consequences. He denies the alleged list fraud.

To exorcise the joke to the Kalauer: If the Vaterstetten town hall was able to save its Schmidt employment position from 2020, then the district office would have to set up two jobs at the same time. In the district council, the Baldhamer has found his parade role with his move there. Born in 1937, he is by far the oldest elected representative in the district – including city and municipal councillors. And the busiest. Always polite in tone, but in his penetration, Manfred Schmidt knows no pain threshold.

His flood of proposals: penetrance beyond the pain threshold

Part of his fireworks of applications, which covers all conceivable topics from the district youth council budget to church asylum, is the fight against the use of the old railway embankment between Glonn and Moosach as a bicycle path. What the Greens have not managed to do in their affair of the heart, the AfD man may have achieved with complaints about the district office at the district and about the district at the Ministry of the Environment: The ministry recently instructed the district government of Upper Bavaria to ensure that the bicycle ban in the landscape conservation area is enforced at the district office.

The complaint path to the top: a classic Schmidt. He likes to lodge complaints against public officials, or sometimes file a criminal complaint. Against a public speaker from ZDF, for example, or a few years ago against reporters from the Ebersberger Zeitung. He does not like criticism of him or the AfD. He is petitioning the EU directly against wind power in forests. The district office received so many, sometimes erroneous inquiries from the right-wing Don Quixote that it came to a district council decision that can confidently be called "Lex Schmidt": The district authority no longer has to answer questions about wind power for which it is not responsible.

At 85, he is the oldest elected official in the district - and the busiest

"I've realized that I don't stand a chance politically. I can bring whatever I want. The district council totally rejects this," says Manfred Schmidt. The victim role is quite right for him, he has that in common with his party. He sits in his living room in Baldham to talk to the EZ. Through the large window panes of the villa-like building, the garden and the edge of the forest shine in green. The mild smell of chlorine from the double garage-sized indoor pool hangs in the air. Walking in the nearby forest and swimming under his own roof – this is how Schmidt keeps himself fit for his fight through the instances, which he wants to lead for another three years until the end of the current legislative period.

"God willing," the 85-year-old, who is wiry for his age, often says when he talks about his future and his health. Then he gestures expansively from the living room chair, as if he were talking about politics. Preferably with an alert, mocking sparkle when he explains his handful of political successes. Apart from his declining hearing, the decades-long political dispute does not seem to affect him. His rants, when he feels ignored in the district council: long ago more a pro forma matter than real indignation.

Why is Schmidt so uncomfortable? - He is familiar with law and administrations

In a recent opinion piece, the Ebersberger Zeitung described the opposition in the district council as "practically non-existent", with a view to the mild breeze to which the headwind has subsided, with which district administrator Robert Niedergesäß (CSU) of the Greens or SPD must reckon. This makes the obstructionist Schmidt all the more unpleasant because he is also familiar with the authorities. He has had a decades-long administrative career in the town hall of Kirchheim (Munich district) until he has since become an executive civil servant and has been a guest student at the LMU law faculty for 20 years, as he explains.

At work, Schmidt was considered a "puke chunk"

He took early retirement in 1995 at the age of 58 and left scorched earth behind at his former workplace. Independently of each other, several people from the political and professional environment of the time call him a "puke chunk" to the editors. At that time, Schmidt had complained against a demotion from his position as managing director by the courts – unsuccessfully. The former caregivers do not want to appear by name here, for fear of renewed legal revenge.

The mayor at the time disempowered him because Schmidt was "not acceptable". He looked more at himself and his own profile than at the community, says someone who should know. For example, in his second position as cultural commissioner, he organized "feasts" at the expense of the municipality, which he also used to establish private networks. The sources of the editors give him credit for having brought top-class artists such as the Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt to Kirchheim. With a smile, Schmidt recounts how he "bribed" the wife of the Georg Büchner Prize winner with a delicacy gift basket. When the local council waved through the early retirement, the administration toasted to Schmidt's departure, insiders report. Little in line with the benevolent appreciation in the municipal gazette.

Radicalization of the AfD: Not a problem issue for Schmidt

The past put aside: Schmidt would probably have it easier without his AfD party book in the Ebersberg district council. It makes him untouchable for the other factions. He doesn't seem to care. Nor is it the case that the former anti-euro professors' party, which he joined in 2013, has radicalized into a right-wing populist and largely nationalist-nationalist and right-wing extremist group, which the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has its eye on.

The man from Baldham seems rather disinterested when he distances himself from historical revisionists such as Björn Höcke and Alexander Gauland – and also does not want to know anything about the repeated racist, right-wing extremist and subversive derailments of the Bavarian state association. "I don't have any contact there," he says. He classifies himself as "half-right" – not a völkisch ideology, but against "unbridled migration" and what he calls "Teutonic megalomania":

He compares development aid to wars of aggression

This has ridden Germany into two world wars and today leads to the country spending too much money on development aid at donor conferences. For Schmidt, it's the same mindset: "It used to be military, now it's financial," he says. Development aid and wars of annihilation: the AfD man gets mentally under one roof. His motto also fits underneath: "I am only a believing sinner." On Sundays he goes to church and says: "One must not close one's eyes to the need in the world."

He looked at the ÖDP and the Bavarian Party. Both are too harmless for him when it comes to migration issues. However, at times it seems more as if he has shaped the ever-opposing party AfD in the district into his political vehicle. The district chairman Christoph Birghan, if he does not take part in lateral thinker demonstrations, is politically invisible. The contribution of the two other AfD parliamentary group members in the district council is limited to keeping their mouths shut and raising their hands to vote with the parliamentary group chairman. Schmidt, her boss, takes over the thinking, speaking and writing. "I have time," he says.

Involvement in his foundation – and in politics

He doesn't go on vacation with his slightly younger wife Ute, nor do they have expensive hobbies, they say. Instead, they run a small foundation that, after the name Schmidt was burned by the social welfare agencies in Vaterstetten due to the electoral list scandal, changed the focus from social to nature conservation. Now Schmidt wants to use the capital to finance a biotope.

The foundation is intended to form the estate of the childless couple. In 2026, at the next local election, he will probably not run again due to age. "Otherwise, there is a risk that my wife will give me notice of the group community." Until then, "God willing", as he likes to say, the district council and the district office do not need to prepare for a subsidence of Schmidt's flood of applications. His need for interference is too great for that. Because of the Biesel incident in the meeting, he wrote "a very clear letter" to the district president of Upper Bavaria, he says. Only one in three letters to this address within a few days. And why not? Schmidt has time.

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