Defense Committee
MPs demand removal of JA boss
FDP politician Strack-Zimmermann is concerned that JA chairman Hannes Gnauck continues to sit on the Bundestag’s defense committee for the AfD. photo
© Bodo Schackow/dpa
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies the Junge Alternative as “certainly right-wing extremist”. MPs no longer want JA chairman Hannes Gnauck on the defense committee.
After the court decision on the AfD’s youth organization, members of the Bundestag from several parties are urging the chairman of the Junge Alternative (JA), Hannes Gnauck, to be a member of the to dismiss the Defense Committee. “The security of our country is not only at risk because the chairman of an extremist organization has access to classified information,” said committee chairwoman Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP) to the “Rheinische Post”. “The ability of our parliament to function is also threatened if the federal government withholds essential information in committee meetings because the chairman of an extremist organization is present.”
On Tuesday, the Cologne Administrative Court declared the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution’s (BfV) classification of the JA as a confirmed extremist endeavor to be legal. Gnauck is a member of the Bundestag for the AfD and has been the federal chairman of the JA since autumn 2022. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the AfD youth organization as “certainly right-wing extremist” in April 2023; it had previously been processed as a suspected case. As a result of this decision, the representatives of the traffic light coalition in the Defense Committee called on the AfD to withdraw Gnauck from the committee. The AfD filed a lawsuit against the BfV’s decision in June 2023 and defended itself against the classification in an urgent application.
The deputy committee chairman Henning Otte (CDU) now demanded in the “Rheinische Post” that Gnauck’s personnel must be examined in the Bundestag’s Council of Elders to determine “whether remaining on the Defense Committee is still appropriate”. The chairwoman of the Greens in the committee, Sara Nanni, said: “The only ones who have the opportunity to recall Hannes Gnauck are the AfD parliamentary group.” But she doesn’t do this. “Rather, it adorns itself with right-wing extremists.”