On Saturday afternoon at 2:18 p.m. the world still seemed to be in order. Three out of four delegates (78.3 percent) of the largest regional association have just re-elected Martin Vincentz as their chairman; The 37-year-old doctor likes to portray himself as the moderate leader of the party. And in the corridors of the event center in Marl – a simple hall where Turkish weddings are usually celebrated – Vincentz in the men’s toilet right next to the prayer room is already being treated as the future pacesetter for the federal AfD: “Martin, that’s our anti- Höcke,” enthuses one follower.
Vincentz, the new counterpoint to the powerful AfD right-winger Björn Höcke from Thuringia? The speculation collapses after five hours. The room is already celebrating another hero: Matthias Helferich, a suspected Höcke confidante, also manages to make the jump to the NRW board. Vincentz is horrified, he knows: From now on, a blue party enemy will be watching his fingers at every meeting. And want to grab him and stop him from doing so as soon as Vincentz tries to differentiate the AfD in the West from right-wing extremist or identitarian circles.
That’s exactly what Helferich had promised his cheering supporters before the election. The party conference should create a state executive committee with him, “the shield is for all members” – and not “a sword” against some. The delegates in their dark blue hoodies clap the loudest Junge Alternative (JA), which in North Rhine-Westphalia is now, according to the court ruling, “certainly right-wing extremist” may be observed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (VS).
In Marl, Helferich smilingly turned the accusation that the youth organization was pursuing an “ethnically defined popular concept” into a matter of honor for the AfD: “Guilty as charged!” The 35-year-old Bundestag member from Dortmund once described himself as the “friendly face of the NS” (National Socialism) – and is kept away from the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag in Berlin. Helferich and his friends see the fact that the North Rhine-Westphalia state executive committee cut the subsidies to its own party youth and an arbitration court threw the deputy leader out of the party as a betrayal of the right-wing cause.
Martin Vincentz, the old and new AfD state leader, is pursuing a different course. He is more of a friendly face for the AfD. Vincentz, as he told WDR before the party conference, wants to build firewalls against his own right-wing extremists: As the “most right-wing party in the German party spectrum, we have “A very great responsibility” to distance oneself from right-wing extremists as much as possible.
Vincentz presents himself above all as a smart party manager
In Marl, Vincentz presented himself to the almost 650 delegates above all as a smart party manager. Someone who wants to prepare his AfD – for bigger things. Since the low in the North Rhine-Westphalia state elections in May 2022 with just 5.4 percent – “a freezing point for us” – the state leader has modernized the party apparatus; now he is reporting record donations. And influx: the number of NRW AfDlers has increased from a good 4,000 to 7,050, just since the publication of the research network Corrective At the meeting in Potsdam, at which right-wing extremist and identitarian representatives discussed plans for a mass forced expulsion of people with a migration background, 851 new members were accepted, and a further 1,900 applications were on file. Surveys put the Blues at 13 to 15 percent approval in the Rhine and Ruhr, Vincentz even calculates 18 percent, and immediately makes a calculation about the weights between East and West AfD: “That would be it,” shouts Vincentz from Marl according to Erfurt, “more voters than Thuringia has residents.”
The AfD wants to score points especially in the northern Ruhr area – a structurally weak region that is impoverished in many urban districts and has an above-average number of immigrants. And in Duisburg, Gelsenkirchen or Herne they will even become the strongest party in the European elections in June, or in 2025 at the latest, in the Bundestag and North Rhine-Westphalia local elections in the autumn.
However, party leader Vincentz warns that one must be vigilant. As the father of two daughters, he warns from his desk to protect children from drag queens or Sharia police. As party leader, however, he fears the German security authorities – and blue right-wing extremists who could ruin his own business. “The opponent, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, is far stronger,” he shouts, “we have to behave intelligently.” And the radical new generation of the party should not endanger “the mother party”. In the event of a party ban, everything would be lost – “all mandates, all money.” As state chairman, he promises, he will “do everything to prevent this.”
At least that was Martin Vincentz’s plan around 2 p.m. on Saturday. The 2,000 counter-demonstrators in the rain had long since left, and even the cloud cover over the event center opened up. The setback for the “Anti-Höcke” came with the sunset.