AfD could appoint mayor for the first time – Germany is looking to Nordhausen

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  • FromFelix Durach

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In Nordhausen in Thuringia, the AfD could appoint a mayor for the first time. Jörg Prophet is the favorite in the runoff election on Sunday. The news ticker.

  • Decision in the runoff election: AfD candidate Jörg Prophet received 42.1 percent of the votes in the first round
  • Next AfD success? Right-wing populists could nominate a mayor for the first time in their history
  • This news ticker about the mayoral election in Nordhausen is updated regularly.

Update from September 24th, 12:26 p.m: The polling stations in Nordhausen have been open since 8 a.m. The AfD hopes to appoint a mayor for the first time in the city in Thuringia. Your candidate Jörg Prophet is running against the incumbent Kai Buchmann (independent). A total of around 32,900 eligible voters are called to cast their votes this Sunday. The SPD, the Greens and the Left support Buchmann in the runoff election.

The top staff of the AfD: coming and going

AfD party conference 2013 in Berlin
On February 6, 2013, 18 people founded the “Alternative for Germany” party in Oberursel (Taunus). The first AfD party conference will take place on April 14, 2013 (pictured). In the federal election of the same year, the new party from the right-wing spectrum immediately achieved 4.7 percent – the best result that a newly founded party has ever received in its first federal election. Of the 18 founders from Oberursel, four were still in the party in July 2017, almost four years later. The comings and goings at the Alternative for Germany in pictures. © imago
Dr. Konrad Adam, journalist and co-founder of the Alternative for Germany (AfD)
Konrad Adam is considered one of the founding fathers of the AfD. The journalist, born in 1942, worked for the daily newspapers FAZ and Welt before becoming one of three federal spokespersons for the AfD from 2013 to 2015. In the following years, the AfD became quiet about Adam. In January 2021 it became clear why: Adam left the AfD, which in his eyes had developed into a right-wing extremist party. © imago
Konrad Adam, Bernd Lucke and Alexander Gauland at the first AfD party conference in Berlin.
But the most famous face of the AfD’s founding phase belongs to the man with his arms raised: Bernd Lucke. Born in West Berlin in 1962 and raised in North Rhine-Westphalia, Lucke studied economics and later became a professor in Hamburg. At the age of 14, Lucke joined the CDU and left the Union 33 years later because he did not agree with the euro rescue policy. The euro and the EU became the central points of criticism that Lucke expressed in relation to federal policy in the following years. The result of this criticism is initially the Euro-critical election alternative in 2013, from which the AfD emerged on April 14, 2013. © imago
Bernd Lucke as chairman of the AfD at a party conference
But Bernd Lucke’s time in the AfD was also only a short one. In 2014 he went into the election campaign for the upcoming European elections as the top candidate of the “Alternative for Germany”. Lucke was then a member of the European Parliament until 2019. But as early as 2015 there were indications that Lucke was losing out in the internal power struggle in the AfD. Leading figures in the AfD such as Björn Höcke and Andre Poggenburg criticized the chairman. He ultimately had to give up his place at the top of the AfD – for many people, this meant leaving one of the last people who saw the AfD as not a right-wing party, but rather a Euro-critical party. © imago
Olaf Henkel GER Berlin 20150112 Alternative for Germany Prof Hans Olaf Henkel Event
At the beginning of 2014, the AfD membership was announced by Professor Hans-Olaf Henkel. Henkel made a name for himself as a successful manager at IBM. He later moved to the association level and became president of the BDI (Federal Association of German Industries). In 2014 he entered the European Parliament for the AfD. Henkel was even the deputy federal spokesman for the “Alternative for Germany” for a year. In 2015, Hans-Olaf Henkel left the AfD again. © imago
Germany Essen Grugahalle 4 Extraordinary AfD party conference Bernd Lucke after the election of F
Bernd Lucke is followed at the helm of the AfD by Frauke Petry. The studied chemist was born in Dresden in 1975. In 2013, she was already one of the three AfD party spokespersons alongside Lucke. In the same year she was also elected chairwoman of the AfD Saxony. Finally, in July 2015, there was an internal power struggle, which Petry won. But just two years later it was over for them again. At the end of September 2017, she left the AfD and, like Lucke, founded her own small party: Petry calls it “The Blue Party”. © imago
Prof. Dr. Jörg Meuthen (M.), federal spokesman for the AfD, Germany, Berlin, federal press conference, topic: AfD – To the Bu
Jörg Meuthen (M.) also suffered a similar fate to Petry and Lucke. The economist, born in Essen in 1961, was elected in 2015 as one of the two federal spokespersons for the AfD. In 2019 he won the election as the first federal chairman of the AfD. But as early as 2021, Meuthen has declared that he does not want to run for chairmanship again. The final exit from the party will follow in 2022. This can be attributed to his defeat in the power struggle with Björn Höcke and the right-wing extremist forces within the AfD. © M. Popow/Imago
Andre Poggenburg, no longer active for the AfD here.
Comes and gone: André Poggenburg, born in 1975, was chairman of the AfD Saxony-Anhalt for four years, from 2014 to 2018. Together with Björn Höcke, Poggenburg wrote the “Erfurt Resolution” in 2015. The document becomes a position paper for the – now supposedly dissolved – ethnic-national wing of the AfD. In January 2019, the AfD’s federal executive board wants to exclude Poggenburg from all offices for two years. But he gets ahead of the party and leaves the AfD shortly afterwards. Poggenburg founds his own party: “Awakening of German Patriots – Central Germany”. In the same year, Poggenburg left this association and has been non-party ever since. © Sebastian Willnow/dpa
Doris Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein in the meeting room of the Schleswig-Holstein State Constitutional Court.
Doris Princess von Sayn-Wittgenstein was also excluded from the AfD. Sayn-Wittgenstein is said to have promoted a right-wing extremist club that was on the AfD’s so-called incompatibility list. But the lawyer, born in 1954, successfully defended herself against the exclusion from the party that a federal arbitration court decided in 2019. Sayn-Wittgenstein has been a party member again since April 15, 2021. However, the AfD is of the opinion that Sayn-Wittgenstein was effectively expelled from the party and has lodged an appeal. © Marcus Brandt/dpa
Alexander Gauland, now an AfD member, former editor of the Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung
A veteran of the AfD who has survived all the personnel changes and is still there: Alexander Gauland. Born in Chemnitz in 1941, Gauland was editor of the Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung (MAZ) before his active political career. The trained lawyer became a CDU member in 1973, and from 1987 he took on various political offices, especially for the Union in Hesse. Gauland remained a CDU member until 2013, before he founded the AfD together with Bernd Lucke and Konrad Adam, among others. In 2017, Gauland became federal spokesman for the AfD (until 2019). From 2017 to 2021 he is one of two parliamentary group leaders alongside Alice Weidel. He will give up this office again in 2021, but will remain the party’s honorary chairman. © imago

AfD candidate in runoff election for mayoralty in Nordhausen, Thuringia

First report: Nordhausen – The right-wing populist AfD is still on the rise in Germany. In the most recent surveys, the party repeatedly achieved values ​​above 20 percent at the federal level. The Alternative for Germany has many sympathizers, especially in East Germany. In the Sonneberg district in Thuringia, the right-wing populists have appointed a district administrator for the first time since July of this year. Shortly afterwards, the AfD also won a mayoral election in Raghun-Jeßnitz (Saxony-Anhalt) – also a first. The next election victory could follow on Sunday (September 24th).

An election poster by Jörg Prophet, AfD candidate for the mayoral election in Nordhausen, is in the city center.

© Martin Schutt/dpa

Mayor election in Nordhausen – AfD facing next success in Thuringia

In Nordhausen, Thuringia, AfD candidate Jörg Prophet wants to become his party’s first mayor. The chances for that are not bad. In the first round of voting, the 61-year-old entrepreneur received 42.1 percent of the vote. In the runoff election he will face incumbent Kai Buchmann (independent), who only received 23.7 percent. Voter turnout in the city with almost 41,000 residents was 56.4 percent.

Prophet can count on prominent support from his own party for his project. Party co-chair Tino Chrupalla and the AfD’s top candidate for the European elections, Maximilian Krah, traveled to Thuringia for campaign appearances. Chrupallas co-chair Alice Weidel also called for the election of Prophet in a video on the platform X (formerly Twitter). “Next Sunday we can make history in Nordhausen – and appoint the first AfD mayor. Support us: Your vote for Jörg Prophet!” wrote Weidel about the clip.

The entire Thuringia regional association of the AfD around parliamentary group leader Björn Höcke is classified in the Constitutional Protection Report for 2021 as a “proven right-wing extremist effort against the free democratic basic order”.

AfD candidate Jörg Prophet – Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution saw a “historical revisionist agenda”

In addition to his party’s current poll high, Prophet could also benefit from the failures of his runoff opponent. Disciplinary proceedings are underway against the incumbent Buchmann due to allegations of bullying; the politician, who previously had a Green Party membership, was suspended for a few months. An administrative court reversed the suspension, Buchmann has been back in office since the beginning of August, but the relationship with the SPD district administrator is considered to be broken.

Prophet also came to the attention of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the past. Especially with an article from 2021 on the Nordhäuser AfD district association website. It’s about the bombing of Dresden and the memory of it. Prophet writes in it: “But it becomes schizophrenic when it is openly propagated today that terror against the civilian population is always permissible when it affects a perpetrator population.” The Office for the Protection of the Constitution later cites excerpts from the text as evidence that the “historical revisionist agenda The AfD has an impact “on the breadth of the regional association”. Prophet did not distance himself from his text.

Mayor election in Nordhausen – concentration camp memorial uninvites AfD candidates

The Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp memorial, which is located in the Nordhausen district, had already distanced itself from Prophet in the run-up to the election. Out of consideration for the survivors and their relatives, Jörg Prophet will not be invited to memorial events, said the acting head of the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial, Anett Dremel. “We have been receiving letters from survivor associations expressing concern for weeks,” said Dremel.

Around 60,000 people were deported to the concentration camp between 1943 and 1945; the SS officially recorded 12,000 deaths. The memorial assumes that at least 20,000 prisoners did not survive the deportation to the concentration camp.(fd with dpa)

Category list image: © Martin Schutt/dpa

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