She is one of the best-known faces of Bayern-AfD, had to be satisfied with the second row and is now back in front: Katrin Ebner-Steiner. It was the 2017 federal elections when journalists from half the republic flocked to their Deggendorf constituency in Lower Bavaria. Because there was a phenomenon to be observed there: the “populist in a dirndl”, as she christened a magazine. With a riot campaign against the CSU and aggressive tones against the refugee policy, Ebner-Steiner, almost always in traditional costume, attracted a lot of attention. Although, once she wore a burqa: She jumped around in it during a performance by Chancellor Angela Merkel in Lower Bavaria. In Deggendorf, their AfD got almost 20 percent in 2017, which was an immense result in West Germany at the time.
It was not enough for the Bundestag due to a lack of list space, but Ebner-Steiner came to the state parliament in 2018 and became the leader of the parliamentary group. After a few months, her co-group leader Markus Plenk fled. He was “sick of being the bourgeois facade of a fundamentally xenophobic and extremist party,” he said, also referring to his partner in the presidency. Halfway through the election period, Ebner-Steiner could no longer be re-elected as boss, in the directional struggle of the camps in the AfD – she is an exponent of the ethnic “wing” – the majorities had shifted. It grew quieter around her.
Now the 44-year-old mother of four and a qualified accountant, who joined the AfD in 2015, has been chosen as the top candidate. In a duo with Martin Böhm, 59, from Upper Franconia, trained mechanic and insurance manager, who also studied communication science. Böhm is also deputy head of state for the AfD. He joined the party in 2013 and remembers how the Coburg-Kronach district association was founded “in a garden house by the light of petroleum.” The euro bailout was “the all-important issue” at the time. The party is known to have long since gone beyond that.
Böhm also belongs to the “wing”, the formally dissolved current of the Thuringian right winger Björn Höcke. The top candidates are correspondingly radical. “They are not fair-weather patriots,” Böhm said when he and Ebner-Steiner were elected at a party convention. “Your anger speaks from our mouths”, i.e. that of the AfD base. “You don’t let your wives be penetrated by strangers, nor your children threatened by cutlers” – these are exactly “the good German virtues”. At the presentation of the election program, Ebner-Steiner announced that one had to “finally turn the tap on illegal mass migration.” So there should be “no new asylum seekers” at all.
In surveys, the AfD is also on the up in Bavaria, but is far behind the national trend, more than 20 percent in the summer. The reason? Hubert Aiwanger and the Free Voters would “steal” AfD topics and slogans. In the election campaign, one hopes for a “leakage” – that AfD voters, “completely normal people”, confess to the party in clubs or at work and thus a “demonization” takes place.