Zoff without any scruples, chat groups out of control, right-wing populist tones or even advertising for the radical Björn Höcke – everything sounds very much like AfD. But that is said to have happened at the Alliance Germany. The party, which was only founded in the fall, wants to close a vacuum in the liberal-conservative milieu as a home for those who are “disappointed” from the Union, FDP, Free Voters and AfD and previously non-party members. Now there is news from the new foundation. The vice-boss in the federal government and in the Bavarian state association, Ellen Walther-Klaus, has announced her withdrawal from all offices internally. The mathematician was previously in the CSU, until she retired she was the managing director of a respectable lobby association for scientific education, supported by employers, for example. And now she’s pretty much fed up with the alliance, in which some disregarded “all the rules of fairness” and happily spread AfD propaganda.
What’s going on there, Mr. Plenk? The former AfD parliamentary group leader Markus Plenk is chairman of the alliance in Bavaria. Incidentally, this means that it has a (non-attached) member of the state parliament. He left the AfD in 2019, when he found that he was fed up with “being the bourgeois facade of a fundamentally extremist party”. He very much regrets Walther-Klaus’ withdrawal, says Plenk when asked by the SZ. If “good people with competence” leave, it’s fatal – “they laugh at their political opponents, the AfD.” The federal leadership must examine how to deal with the “machinations” complained about by the colleague. Walther-Klaus himself could not be reached by phone.
Anyone who asks around the alliance will find out that there are attempts to infiltrate by former AfD members, especially in the Free State. Not by moderate ex-members of the Plenk variety, who today always talks about his past in a somewhat coy manner. But by people with strong convictions. Up to a tenth of the members are said to have an “AfD 2.0” in mind. But in the state association in absolute numbers this is only good for a football team. He continues to firmly believe that the alliance is needed as an offer to conservative-liberal voters, says Plenk. Voting for the AfD in protest is “the stupidest thing you can do”. The only question is whether the party itself will not become an AfD.