The fact that individual residents in Marktl can be upset about the planned wind turbines in the Altöttinger Forest was recently shown on Monday at a citizens’ event with Bavaria’s Economics Minister Hubert Aiwanger (FW). The following day, the Marktl local councilors and local representatives of the citizens’ initiative “Gegenwind Altötting” agreed on a very sober question for the referendum in June. However, according to Mayor Benedikt Dittmann (CSU), it wasn’t that easy – especially because of growing disagreements within the BI. Because of the influence of AfD representatives, some members have now publicly turned away from the initiative. The lawyer who advised her on the citizens’ initiative has also resigned from her mandate.
“I won’t let people like that put me in the driver’s seat,” says administrative lawyer Frank C. Starke, explaining why he doesn’t want to continue advising the BI. He said he swore his legal oath to the constitution over 30 years ago and did not want his name to be associated with AfD representatives who apparently wanted to gain even more influence in the BI and were “clearly enemies of the constitution in my eyes.”
At the same time, Starke suspects that the vast majority of BI members are “honest people” who have an issue and want to bring about a decision about it in a democratic process – just people like those with whom he had dealt up to that point. However, some of them have now withdrawn and have to endure hostility as a result, like some of them himself.
One of those who left is the previous BI spokesman, who, together with two other former activists, justified his move in a statement as follows: “The whole project has now become far too big and important to leave the field to political currents far from the center. ” This is “no longer morally justifiable for us” because their own values are “incompatible with the approaches of the AfD”. However, an AfD official from Altötting was significantly involved in “Gegenwind Altötting” from the beginning and always tried to direct the protest against the wind farm to his party’s agenda.
Many people in the region are critical of the plans pushed by the state government and the local chemical industry for 40 wind turbines in the state forest. But not all of them see themselves represented by the BI, as residents in Mehring recently made clear. At the first referendum at the end of January, a two-thirds majority of Mehring residents ordered their community to exhaust all legally possible means against the ten wind turbines planned on their land. A practically identical question was too vague for the local councilors in nearby Marktl. On the day of the European elections on June 9th, there will simply be a vote on whether the community agrees to three wind turbines on Marktler Flur or not.