Brandenburg will elect a new state parliament on September 22nd, and the first election posters have been up across the state.
The AfD poster, which had an unmistakable Nazi symbol, was discovered in the town of Frankfurt on the Oder in Brandenburg, one of three eastern states where the AfD is expected to emerge as the strongest party in September elections.
The controversial image caused Anja Kreisel, the district head of the city’s left-wing party Die Linke, to file a court complaint against the AfD, claiming that it “awakens associations with forbidden gestures” and may violate the statute prohibiting Nazi symbols. The local state prosecutor’s office stated that it was investigating the issue.
Despite harsh criticism, Wilko Möller, AfD chairman in Frankfurt, called the outrage “absurd” and said the poster was simply intended to demonstrate that the party cared for children, adding that the man and woman’s fingertips meet to form a roof over three fair-haired children alongside the slogan “We’ll Protect Your Children”.
“We rule out provocation. Using that logic, every Mercedes driver should be described as a provocateur because the Nazi leaders also drove or were driven around in Mercedes.”
It’s worth noting that Wilko Möller is already renowned for provocative behavior: a sticker on the rear of the white-painted automobile (Mercedes!) at his constituency office reads, “I am white – and that’s a good thing!“.
The German domestic intelligence agency BfV is keeping an eye on the AfD. The party has been accused of courting far-right voters by evoking Nazi imagery, but maintaining that it has no connections to the Third Reich.
Björn Höcke, the head of the AfD in the eastern state of Thuringia, was found guilty in April of uttering the outlawed Nazi catchphrase “Alles für Deutschland” [Everything for Germany] at a political speech. The former history teacher at a high school claimed not to know where the Sturmabteilung (SA), Hitler’s Nazi party’s paramilitary stormtroopers, got the motto. He was fined €13,000.
Leading AfD members, according to the BfV, linguists, and politicians from other parties, are purposefully breaking language taboos by reintroducing Nazi-era vocabulary into public discourse. Examples of such terms include “Lügenpresse” [lying press], used by Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, or repeated references to the German “Volk,” which refers to an ethnically homogenous, or white, population.
Also, AfD politicians are known as long-time reliable friends and faithful allies of Putin’s regime. Andreas Jurca, Elena Roon and Ulrich Singer, AfD party members from Bavarian State Parliament were the fake observers at «elections», organized by Kremlin on 15-17 March this year both within Russia and in illegally occupied Ukrainian territories, including Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Crimea.
This is hardly a unique instance of AfD members’ pro-Kremlin actions. Seven members of the AfD went to Russian-occupied Crimea in 2018 to vote as fictitious observers in the Russian presidential election. Waldemar Herdt, who was an AfD member of the Bundestag from 2017 to 2021, frequently made appearances on Russian television programs, where he denied any annexation and said, among other things, that the “referendum” in occupied Crimea was genuine. Some have been identified as having close links to the Russian government, resisting EU sanctions against Russia, endorsing Russian propaganda against Ukraine, and supporting the Assad administration in Syria.
Voting for Nazi salute fans and the supporters of the aggressor is inappropriate.
