It was supposed to be a big production. “Solidarity with Daniel Halemba” was the motto under which the AfD youth Junge Alternative (JA) called for a demonstration for the recently arrested AfD politician on Saturday. Of course, the organizers did not choose the location by chance: they wanted to protest directly in front of the Würzburg district court, which had issued an arrest warrant against Halemba a little over a week ago for, among other things, alleged incitement to hatred.
The particularly explosive nature of the whole thing taking place at Zwilling-Scholl-Platz was accepted; perhaps it was also considered a deliberate provocation. In any case, nothing came of the big production: the person who registered canceled the demonstration, as the police in Lower Franconia did on Saturday morning South German newspaper confirmed.
JA Germany announced on social networks that the cancellation was due to a decision by the Bavarian JA regional association. The decision emerged “from discussions with several actors involved in the process”. According to information, this means the South German newspaper the Bavarian AfD leadership. In particular, the state chairman, Bundestag member Stephan Protschka, is said to have previously advocated for a cancellation. In AfD circles, the demo, for which, according to a Würzburg city spokesman, 75 people were registered, was apparently seen as a signal that could hardly be conveyed: solidarity with someone who the public prosecutor’s office has accused of specific crimes and who can obviously be classified as far to the right in the political spectrum.
As a reminder: The police and public prosecutor’s office are investigating Daniel Halemba, 22, on suspicion of incitement to hatred and the use of symbols of anti-constitutional and terrorist organizations. According to the public prosecutor’s office, during searches in September in his room in the fraternity house of the Prague Teutonia zu Würzburg fraternity, an SS order from Heinrich Himmler with a double victory rune was found, and he is also said to have signed the words “Sieg Heil” with his name.
Halemba subsequently “massively intimidated” a co-accused, and an arrest warrant was issued; Halemba went into hiding and was finally arrested on Monday – until the Würzburg district court suspended his execution under certain conditions. He was unable to take part in the inaugural state parliament session last Monday.
A decision on whether the public prosecutor’s office will appeal against the decision to suspend the arrest warrant is expected at the beginning of next week. The investigators would of course have followed the demonstration closely – after all, it would have been entirely conceivable that Halemba, who is prohibited from contacting the four other co-accused according to the regulations, would have met them there. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution would also have had the Würzburg campaign in its sights.
Incidentally, the JA emphasized one thing despite the rejection: it still stands by the message that it wanted to convey with the demonstration: the “repressions directed against patriots in the Free State of Bavaria and the political instrumentalization of state institutions” should be condemned in the strongest possible terms. However, there are no signs that such “repression directed against patriots” and “political instrumentalization of state institutions” exist.
Is there now a risk of a conflict in the AfD over the Halemba case and how it is being dealt with? According to information from the AfD state leader Protschka South German newspaper In the previous days, he wrote in an internal party chat group that he had made his “disapproval of the planned event on Saturday in Würzburg clear” to the Junge Alternative (JA). He “explained this in detail during a phone call. Maybe you’ll come to your senses.” When asked by the SZ on Friday, Protschka confirmed the authenticity of the chat statement, but he was not willing to discuss the reasons for his displeasure. But he was obviously successful in his efforts.
Nothing more has been heard from the top of the state parliamentary group. On Friday a week ago, she herself made public the arrest warrant against a member, who quickly turned out to be Daniel Halemba. “Such things are otherwise only known from totalitarian dictatorships,” raged parliamentary group leader Katrin Ebner-Steiner. There was a lot of obvious solidarity with Halemba from AfD MPs around the first days of meetings of the new Bavarian state parliament on Monday and Tuesday. There were hugs and shared pictures with members of the parliamentary group leadership in the plenary hall on Tuesday, when the released young MP took part in a full session for the first time.
The state parliamentary group is on the move
Since the public prosecutor’s detailed allegations became known: nothing more. “The state parliamentary group is going into hiding,” was how the newspaper put it Young freedom, which is said to be close to the AfD but distant from the ethnic AfD “wing”. After the AfD federal executive committee did not want to comment on the case when asked by the newspaper, the group’s statement is now that “no further statement will be made on the ongoing investigation. We will discuss further action in the responsible committees.” A query from the SZ to the parliamentary group on Friday confirmed that this is still true.
Since the hype surrounding his person, Halemba has not only been celebrated in indisputably right-wing extremist circles, but he has also created a profile on the “X” platform, formerly Twitter. And there it blatantly spreads theses that are relevant to the monitoring or further measures of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The “cult of guilt” must be ended, he wrote, and German raison d’état must be “the security of Germany and Europe, not Israel’s.” Or there was talk of a “replacement migration by Africans & Arabs” – the narrative of population exchange.
For example, former AfD people who left the party because of right-wing extremist activities are seeing their move confirmed these days. The faction has grown to include many staunchly right-wing radical young MPs, including specifically from the YES camp, who did not try to camouflage their “almost National Socialist ideas”. In earlier times, not so long ago, incidents involving “Sieg Heil” and Nazi memorabilia were a reason for party expulsion. Now the parliamentary group or the regional association is not even distancing themselves from the specific content of the allegations, even if the processes surrounding the arrest warrant can be criticized as exaggerated and strange.
You can also hear within the party itself: The “sound of the young alternative” is currently breaking through uninhibitedly in the AfD – and is shaping the overall appearance of the regional association. “Who should choose that, who do you want to attract with Hitler and Himmler?” What is more up for debate is whether a large proportion of the 14.6 percent of people in Bavaria who voted for the AfD four weeks ago because of asylum or energy policy, for example, are not now looking at the Halemba case with horror.