From
John Osel
When a new election poll is shown on social networks, it usually only takes a few minutes before someone alienates the image in the comments – and turns the AfD’s blue bar into a brown, the color of the National Socialists. Last fall, not just any user did it, but a party: The CSU put a new Forsa survey on its Facebook channel and whitewashed the then eight percent of the AfD with brown paint. The Lower Bavarian AfD MP Ralf Stadler then filed a criminal complaint.
Not only was his honor hurt by this, but all voters in the party were “generally insulted and slandered” because of the NSDAP reference. The Munich I public prosecutor’s office has now decided to drop the case: There is no insult, slander, defamation or hate speech. So to put it bluntly: Brown is allowed to represent the AfD.
According to the public prosecutor’s office, an insult requires an “individualized victim” – that is not the case here. The electorate, in turn, is “not a definable, insulting majority of people”; and the brown bar could also mean individual prominent representatives or parts of the AfD who “are known” to “cross the border to right-wing extremism”.
Overall, the posting by the CSU is a “bold characterization” and an “expression of opinion that is still permissible in the end”. Stadler is angry about the defeat. And wedges against the authors of the brown bar: The whole cause “only shows the current nervousness of the CSU”.