The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was fined €402,900 ($455,548) by German parliament's administrative authority on Tuesday.
The fine is related to illegal campaign funds for two of the party's officials.
Read more: AfD scandal: Party sent wrong donor names to German parliament
Illicit campaign financing:
- The campaign funds originated from Swiss public relations agency Goal AG.
- German parties and candidates are not permitted to receive donations from non-EU entities.
- The funds were used to finance state election campaigns in 2016 and 2017 for national chairman Jörg Meuthen and national board member Guido Reil.
- AfD co-leader Alice Weidel could also be fined for receiving illegal funds, again from Switzerland, where she lived for years.
- The court set the fines to total three times the amount of the illegal donations.
- Both Meuthen and Reil are running for German seats in the European parliamentary elections slated for May.
Read more: Euroskeptic, anti-immigrant parties team up for EU election
'Financial damage'
A Bundestag administration spokeswoman said authorities confirmed the monetary donations should have been refused by the German politicians because "the donors were not identifiable at the time the donations were accepted."
A group of AfD politicians have said they believe candidates and party members "who personally benefit" from illicit donations should be "personally held responsible for the financial damage they cause the party."
Read more: Who votes for Germany's far-right party AfD? Not who you'd think
Not the first time
This is not the first time the far-right party has been embroiled in a campaign financing scandal. The AfD claimed in February that a Swiss pharmaceutical company had transferred money to Weidel's campaign on behalf of 14 people with EU citizenship.
Weidel's campaign reportedly spent the donation of roughly €130,000 on social media advertising and legal fees. However, her campaign later returned the funds after media allegations that the donors were only approached by the AfD afterwards, and were paid to say they donated.
Every evening, DW's editors send out a selection of the day's hard news and quality feature journalism. You can sign up to receive it directly here.
-
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
-
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."
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
-
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.
-
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.
-
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former 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.
-
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.
-
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, Mark Hallam
ls/msh (AFP, dpa)