analysis
Status: 09.12.2022 08:57 a.m
“Complete trust” in the authorities – or “diversionary maneuvers”: These are the AfD reactions to the “Reichsbürger” raid. The top said nothing about the arrested ex-MP.
“Secret plan to overthrow” is scrawled with a spelling mistake on a piece of paper as a heading. “New government with me” is one of the items listed below. The photo of this note is supposed to be a meme with which the AfD district association Hamburg-Bergedorf collects likes on Facebook. The words of thanks to the security authorities are obviously meant ironically.
The major raid on Wednesday, one of the largest police operations in the history of the Federal Republic, is being ridiculed.
As far as the AfD party leadership itself is concerned, there is not much to be elicited from the “Reich citizens”: “We condemn such efforts and emphatically reject them,” said Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla in a four-sentence dry message after the raid . You have “complete trust in the authorities involved”.
Even on the day after the plans for the coup were uncovered, there was no word on the fact that judge Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, a former AfD member of the Bundestag, was also arrested.
Just a “distraction” for some
But the taciturnity of the executive floor is in stark contrast to the heated debate in the party forums. like that ARD Capital Studio from the parliamentary group is confirmed, the prevailing opinion in chat groups is that it was all a set-up game by the security authorities. A cover-up to distract attention from a murder. In Illerkirchberg, Baden-Württemberg, a man attacked two schoolgirls with a knife on Monday, one of them died. The suspect is a 27-year-old man from Eritrea.
“In order to completely distract the citizens from the story, a right-wing extremist terrorist group was conjured up out of a hat,” says Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, member of the state parliament for Saxony-Anhalt, who is being observed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. He follows up in Internet forums: Unlike the federal executive board, he does not have “complete trust in the authorities involved”. A chat group association is being systematically inflated, “and the BuVo isn’t opposed to it.”
“Greatly staged and great cinema”
With his attitude, Tillschneider apparently speaks from the soul of many in the AfD: One thing you have to give Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, tweeted the Berlin AfD politician Georg Pazderski, “the raid on the old citizens of the Reich was well staged and great cinema”. She “understood perfectly how to push the bloody deed in Illerkirchberg out of the headlines”.
The “Reichsbürger”, who are responsible for the murder of a police officer in 2016, as a group of crazy but harmless seniors? This reading is apparently widespread in the AfD: “‘Coup d’etat’ with 50 pensioners? They wouldn’t even take the town hall of San Marino!” scoffs AfD member of the Bundestag Petr Bystron on Twitter. And adds: “The efforts to fabricate a ‘danger from the right’ are becoming more and more absurd.”
The AfD comments always follow the same knitting pattern: the coup plans of the right-wing “Reich citizens” are played down or trivialized, while the police action is either ridiculed as a PR campaign or even degraded to a political ruse. But is the rumor of a “diversionary tactic” possibly more of a “diversionary tactic” by the AfD?
What is striking is that any connections between the party and the “Reich Citizens” scene are considered silent.
Höcke advises leaving chat groups
Hardly anyone goes into the fact that presumably one of “theirs” wanted to actively help to undermine democracy: the judge and ex-Bundestag member Malsack-Winkemann, praised in 2019 by party leader Weidel as a “great politician”. She is still not only a member of the AfD, but even an assessor in the party’s federal arbitration court.
The party headquarters does not want to comment on this for the time being. Only the names of the assessors can no longer be found on the AfD website – unlike before the raid. The party leadership no longer seems to feel really comfortable around those arrested.
And the Thuringian state association of the AfD, which the right-wing extremist Björn Höcke heads, even feels compelled to advise its members to check their own chat groups. There are said to be numerous of them, in which it is announced that peaceful demonstrations for fundamental rights are useless and “we now have to resort to other means”. This is what it says in a published letter to members. It is advisable, Höcke continues, to leave such groups.
It is remarkable that such advice seems necessary in a party that always labels itself “bourgeois”.