From
John Osel
The AfD parliamentary group has failed to re-chair a committee in the state parliament. In the Education Committee, MP Oskar Atzinger did not find a majority on Thursday: 13 votes against Atzinger, two for him, one abstention. The actually deputy chairman Tobias Gotthardt (free voters) continues to chair the committee. At the beginning of the 2018 election period, the AfD was given the leadership of the committee, Markus Bayerbach was then head, initially without criticism of his session management. In the course of the AfD chat affair, Bayerbach was voted out in January 2022. Formally, the AfD is still entitled to a replacement proposal.
Before Bayerbach’s dismissal, there had been media reports about a telegram group of elected representatives, members and sympathizers of the AfD, and revelations by SZ and Bayerischer Rundfunk had documented, among other things, overthrow fantasies in the chat, which had been active for years. Contrary to what was originally claimed in the committee, Bayerbach was also listed among the sometimes hundreds of chat participants. Colleagues on the Education Committee therefore accused him of lying, that trust had been shaken. So Bayerbach lost his office. A few months later he left the AfD and has been a non-attached member of parliament ever since.
Atzinger came to the state parliament as a successor after a death a good year ago. In his maiden speech, he pleaded for the “legitimate security interests of Russia” in the Ukraine conflict, to the dismay of parliament. He supports the völkisch-dominated camp within the quarreling AfD faction. After the meeting on Thursday, Atzinger spoke of “undemocratic exclusion” – the “old party alliance” left an important chair vacant “for ideological reasons”. Gotthardt announced that as acting chairman he would continue his work in the interests of “a modern, cosmopolitan and ambitious education policy for Bavaria”. “Proposing Atzinger as the new chairman of the education committee is the democratic right of the AfD. Rejecting him by a majority is the democratic right of the education committee.”