An overthrow of the system, a revolution? The AfD member of the state parliament Anne Cyron from Upper Bavaria apparently considered this to be an option at the end of last year. “I think that we will not get out of this number without the civil war,” she is said to have written in a chat. As confirmation of an AfD district chairman who wanted a “total revolution” against the “ruling criminals”, “this whole policy should be set on fire”. This is said to have met with approval from, for example, Georg Hock, member of the AfD regional executive and Kulmbach district council: “absolute approval”.
Research by Bayerischer Rundfunk, based on contributions from a closed Telegram chat called “Alternative Nachrichtengruppe Bayern” with hundreds of members, reveals a panorama of radical tones. These include statements that a constitutional lawyer classifies as “revolutionary rhetoric” and the fight against the free-democratic basic order; also often with reference to Corona, for example when it comes to a “vaccination genocide”. And not in out-of-the-way circles: According to BR, 16 of the 18 members of the state parliament and eleven of the twelve Bavarian members of the Bundestag are in the group, ten out of 13 people from the state executive. There should only be contradiction occasionally. So is it all socially acceptable? The debate about the radicalism of the AfD in Bavaria has rekindled.
In the spring it became known that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution had classified the AfD as a suspected right-wing extremist case, against which the party was suing. The Bavarian Office contributes material to the evaluation of the Federal Office, in the Free State the Young Alternative and the formally dissolved völkisch “wing” are observed. The state office recognizes a “secured right-wing extremist tendency” in the current, which is located in a “period of revolution”.
Only this much: “The thoughts are free.”
Research by the Süddeutsche Zeitung in another chat group especially close to wing friends. Actor here too: Georg Hock from Upper Franconia. He wrote, for example, that even more moderate rights complained that Germany could no longer be saved by parliamentary-democratic means. As a result, “everyone shuns it. Doesn’t even fit into Biedermeier thinking”. When asked by SZ, Hock said he was not commenting on any specific sentences. Only this much: “Thoughts are free”, even if he discusses the “system question”, he wants to “preserve democracy”. Hock does not fail to mention that one of the BR authors is “half-Egyptian”. He does not elaborate on what that means exactly.
Incidentally, in this wing group, Anne Cyron is viewed as a “great disappointment” – because she joined the alliance in the state parliamentary group that voted out of the group’s leadership two months ago. The majority camp in the faction now led by Christian Klingen and Ulrich Singer is politically heterogeneous. The parliamentary group leadership announced on Wednesday: “The elected representatives of our party are law-abiding, patriotically-oriented democrats for whom the well-being of our homeland comes first.”
The Bundestag member Stephan Protschka is the new chairman of the AfD Bavaria.
(Photo: Angelika Warmuth / dpa)
The AfD is “firmly on the ground of the Basic Law”, it is about “statements taken from the context of individual people in a chat group”. Anne Cyron told the SZ: “Subversion and revolution and thus the destabilization of a political system” are the “greatest evil that can affect a society”. In constant concern for the state and the community, she wrote in the chat that “this destabilization could come about at some point”. That is by no means a call for revolution. Meanwhile, glee is germinating among Wing people that now “the other guys are the bad guys too”.
“Fear that things could come to that in this banana republic”
There are also differentiated views in AfD circles. Almost everyone is in the chat, up to 500 postings accumulated in it during the day. “You often suppress that” without reading everything or even commenting on it. Yes, there were also “crazy” and “strict right-wing extremists” up to mischief. But one shouldn’t see that as “an overall picture of the AfD that is tolerated by everyone”. At the same time, more moderate AfD members are saddened that almost only wing people or wing sympathizers came to the post in October when the new state executive committee was elected.
The new state chief and member of the Bundestag Stephan Protschka, according to BR an administrator of the chat, denies when asked that there were upheaval fantasies. If a sentence is preceded by “I think”, it means: Someone is “afraid that things could come to this point in this banana republic”. This is a political analysis “covered by freedom of expression”. In addition, it is “not an official AfD group”. Protschka considers the allegations to be politically motivated, with a view to the imminent ruling on the classification of the federal party by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The Greens in the state parliament on Wednesday demanded the observation of the entire AfD in Bavaria: Cemal Bozoglu evaluates the chats as evidence of “how far the contempt for parliamentary democracy has already progressed, even among leading functionaries of the party”.