At the beginning of August, local AfD politician Peter Junker insulted queer people at his party’s European party conference in Magdeburg. Sven Bäring, the chairman of the QueerBw association, the advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, intersex and opposite-sex members of the Bundeswehr, reported him. The Magdeburg district court has now sentenced the 65-year-old from Finsing to a fine of 100 daily rates for incitement to hatred. The verdict was issued as a penalty order, i.e. purely in writing without an oral main hearing. Peter Junker accepted the penalty order and did not lodge an objection; the verdict is therefore legally binding.
At the party conference in Magdeburg, Peter Junker, who was actually only there as a delegate, spontaneously applied for a place on the AfD’s European election list. It was completely hopeless, but it gave him nine minutes of attention. After he had uttered well-known AfD theses – people in Germany have been lied to and manipulated by the media for years, as an AfD member you are discriminated against, and climate change does not exist – he went on to defame queer people. Junker said: “If my four-year-old daughter is talked to by a drag queen, has to have a drag queen storybook read to her and has to think it’s good,” then the AfD must provide “clarification”: “There are no 132,000 genders, there are only two genders, man and woman, without ifs and buts. So let’s protect the best we have, our children, our offspring. Let’s protect them from perversities, from abnormalities, from state-tolerated child fuckers.”
With these statements, Peter Junker made it onto the evening TV news and other television reports. There were a lot of extreme speeches at the AfD European Party conference. But Junker’s statements were always shown at the end in several compilations. Just like in the ARD summer interview with Alice Weidel, where the AfD federal spokeswoman, when asked whether “openly radical” was the new motto of her party, replied succinctly that there was freedom of expression in the AfD.
Peter Junker is just a small number in the AfD. He has been a member for five years, previously he was with the CSU for 15 years. Since 2020 he has been sitting on the local council of the 4,800-inhabitant town of Finsing. When he ran as a Bundestag candidate in the Erding-Ebersberg constituency in 2021, he received 6.9 percent of the first votes. Junker is deputy chairman of the AfD Erding district association and fourth assessor on the Upper Bavaria district board, something he is “very proud” of, as he says in a two-year-old video message on his Facebook page.
A video recording of his speech in Magdeburg can no longer be found on his Facebook page. At first he was really proud that his speech had made him a little famous. He would say exactly that again and again, he had posted on Facebook and included the video.
Sven Bäring, federal chairman of QueerBW.
(Photo: UniBW)
Sven Bäring, first lieutenant in the Luftwaffe, federal chairwoman of QueerBw since 2019 and appointed this year by Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) to the advisory board for internal leadership issues, overheard Junker’s statements more or less by chance. He followed the AfD European party conference in a live stream on YouTube. He didn’t hesitate for long and filed a report with the police in Cologne that same evening. Because of jurisdiction based on the crime scene principle, the local public prosecutor’s office transferred the matter to Magdeburg, where the proceedings were quickly concluded.
The Magdeburg district court viewed Peter Junker’s statements as a clear criminal offense. Paragraph 130 of the Criminal Code states, among other things, that anyone who “attacks the human dignity of others by (…) insulting, maliciously disparaging or slandering parts of the population (…) is guilty of sedition.” The court spokesman did not want to name the daily rate because that would allow conclusions to be drawn about Junker’s income. That is too private. In any case, 100 daily rates are “a pound,” said the court spokesman, and not a trivial matter. Peter Junker is therefore considered to have a criminal record and receives an entry in his certificate of good conduct.
Sven Bäring sees the outcome of the proceedings as positive for several reasons. He was quite skeptical as to whether his complaint would have any consequences. “I rather assumed it would be discontinued.” Because he asked himself whether “the state is sensitive to my concerns and those of my community.” It is “reassuring for him and others that this is the case.” Bäring also says that he didn’t just file the complaint out of “personal perception”: “After language comes violence, so it’s important that you intervene.”