Almost two months after right-wing extremist action with alleged mannequins of the three candidates for chancellor in Würzburg, the interior committee in the state parliament requests a report on the incident from the state government. The right-wing extremist splinter party “Der III. Weg” laid out straw dolls with fake blood in Würzburg and draped photos of the faces of Olaf Scholz (SPD), Armin Laschet (CDU) and Annalena Baerbock (Greens). According to the party, the bodies were supposed to represent the victims of the Würzburg knife attack by a Somali in the summer, observers rather imagined a call to violence against the politicians. The Greens requested a report from the state government in the Interior Committee on Wednesday, which should clarify unanswered questions, in particular why the provocation “was not stopped in advance by the police and the public prosecutor or ended immediately at the latest on the day of the event because of clear incitement to the people and inciting violence”. All MPs, with the exception of the AfD, approved this request for a report.
The neo-Nazi party, said the Green parliamentary group leader Katharina Schulze at the meeting, is known to always test “with their actions the limits of what is legally permissible”. The demonstration had been registered, “you knew what was happening”. According to the application, there were concerns on the part of the public order office before the action, and on the day itself there were indications of criminal relevance and “the irreverent character” of the symbolic representation. The police present and also representatives of the public prosecutor’s office had decided against canceling it, and the law enforcement agency only changed its assessment afterwards. Since then, investigations into the initial suspicion of sedition and the request to commit crimes have been ongoing.
As the Ministry of Justice later announced in response to a request from the green right-wing extremism expert Cemal Bozoğlu, “there was no official intervention because an initial on-site assessment by the public prosecutor did not initially lead to an initial suspicion of criminal behavior”. The basis for this assessment “was an initial preliminary assessment taking into account the circumstances evident at the time”. The organizers themselves had claimed that posters such as “stop the flood of asylum” or “foreigners out” made the context clear as a demonstration critical of migration.
“Strongly neo-Nazi right-wing extremism”
For Cemal Bozoğlu it is “a blatant political misjudgment by the public prosecutor and an operational failure of the local police”. He asks: “Why was all this only recognized in retrospect?” In his opinion, the government now “does not want to step on the feet” of the public prosecutor’s office and is avoiding the investigation. The Greens are particularly sensitive to provocations by this right-wing extremist party, as there are also posters with “Hang the Greens!” In the Bundestag election campaign. had given – a Bavarian court ruled, unlike in another federal state, that this was like a murder call and had nothing to do with hanging up posters.
The governing parties CSU and Free Voters agreed to the motion to request a report. The CSU MP Alfred Grob said in the Interior Committee that the state government had answered parliamentary questions and that “in total” little new was to be expected. A “clear added value” of such a report is that the expected results of the ongoing investigations can be incorporated. A round picture of the cause, so to speak. The CSU, Grob emphasized, is “against any form of extremism”.
The State Office for the Protection of the Constitution sees the III. Away a “strongly neo-Nazi right-wing extremism”, with “clear parallels” to the program of the NSDAP. Most recently, the office also registered anti-Semitic agitation in the wake of the corona pandemic. The party in Bavaria has a good 160 party members, which is almost a quarter of its nationwide following. In the federal election, the party in the Free State got 3544 second votes, which is shown as 0.0 percent.