AfD manifesto ′violates′ the constitution - German justice minister | News | DW | 11.09.2017

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AfD manifesto 'violates' the constitution - German justice minister

Justice Minister Heiko Maas has warned that several parts of the anti-immigration party's election platform are illegal. AfD party candidates are facing accusations of racism and a possible charge of incitement.

Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland

Amid the rising fortunes of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in pre-election opinion polls, the party on Monday faced renewed scrutiny of its manifesto when a senior minister claimed its program flouts the Basic Law (German constitution).

Justice Minister Heiko Maas warned that the AfD's religious, family, criminal and European policies are in clear violation of Articles 1, 3, 4 and 23 of the charter.

Minaret ban singled out

He singled out a blanket ban on minarets - the towers on mosques from which the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer - which the anti-immigration, anti-Islam party has promised to introduce if it were to win the September 24 federal election.

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"Naturally, every religion must respect our constitutional order," Maas said in a guest article for the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. But he added that Germany's Basic Law permits "freedom of religion" and prohibits "discrimination on the grounds of faith or religious beliefs."

With just two weeks until the election, the AfD is polling between 8 and 11 percent, which could make it the third largest party after Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives and  the Social Democrats.

  • Alexander Gauland (picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat)

    AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

    Alexander Gauland

    Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team's defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch - but people would not want "someone like Boateng as a neighbor." He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: "We can't be blackmailed by children's eyes."

  • Weidel and Gauland (Reuters/F.Bensch)

    AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

    Alice Weidel

    Alice Weidel generally plays the role of "voice of reason" for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians "pigs" and "puppets of the victorious powers in World War II. Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.

  • Frauke Petry (Getty Images/T. Lohnes)

    AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

    Frauke Petry

    German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must "use firearms if necessary" to "prevent illegal border crossings." Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.

  • Björn Höcke (picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz)

    AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

    Björn Höcke

    The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year - leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.

  • Beatrix von Storch (picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat)

    AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

    Beatrix von Storch

    Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts - but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers."

  • Marcus Pretzell (picture alliance/dpa/M. Murat)

    AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

    Marcus Pretzell

    Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote "These are Merkel's dead," shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.

  • Andre Wendt (picture alliance/ZB/H. Schmidt)

    AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

    Andre Wendt

    The member of parliament in Germany's eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) - the vast majority of them young men.

  • Andre Poggenburg(picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf)

    AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

    Andre Poggenburg

    Poggenburg, head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" - the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.

  • Alexander Gauland AfD

    AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

    Alexander Gauland - again ...

    During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be "disposed of" back to Anatolia. The German term, "entsorgen," raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.

  • Alexander Gauland

    AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

    ... and again

    Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany's responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."

    Author: Dagmar Breitenbach


Maas warned that for the first time since 1949, a party was likely to clear what's known as the 5 percent hurdle to be represented in the Bundestag with an election manifesto that is partly unconstitutional.

In Germany's election, the electorate votes for a candidate (first vote) to represent their constituency and then a party (second vote).

The 5 percent hurdle has served to keep the far-right NPD and other extremist parties out of the German parliament until now.

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Possible charges against AfD candidate

Meanwhile, the prosecutor's office in a small central German city is considering levying charges against the AfD's top candidate Alexander Gauland for alleged incitement.

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At a recent election event in Mühlhausen, in the state of Thuringia, Gauland hit out against Germany's Integration Minister Aydan Özoguz (SPD), suggesting that she needed to be "disposed of."

The prosecutor's office said it received several complaints after the party put up posters in southern Germany, again using the term "disposal" in reference to Özoguz.

On Sunday evening, the AfD candidate said that he knew nothing of an investigation. "I consider that completely misguided," he said.

Racist email unearthed

Over the weekend, the populist right-wing party's other lead candidate Alice Weidel was accused of using racist language in a 2013 email.

The writer of the email argues that Germany's ruling class is allowing German society to be destroyed by a flood of "culturally incompatible people like Arabs, Sinti and Roma."

"These pigs," the email reads, in reference to Angela Merkel's government, "are nothing other than marionettes of the victorious powers of World War II."

The AfD has claimed that the email, which was published by the Welt am Sonntag newspaper, is a forgery, but the paper has said it received it from an acquaintance of Weidel who has sworn a legal oath that it is genuine.

In a filmed  Internet appearance on Sunday evening, Weidel refused to comment upon the email, saying that was beneath her.

But when asked whether she would be willing to swear a similar legal oath that she was not the email's author, the AfD candidate did not take up that suggestion, saying only that the reporter "would see" what measures she would be taking in response.

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mm/jm (AFP, dpa, KNA)

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