Germany's populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party will on Saturday announce plans to set up a television studio in its Berlin offices and employ up 20 new communications staff.
According to advanced excerpts of a report slated to be published in full in Saturday's edition of German news magazine Focus, the AfD is looking to bypass Germany's mainstream media landscape and build on its successes in communicating directly to the public. The far-right party is reportedly looking to launch the service in April.
Read more: Germany's populist AfD seeks to turn online 'censorship' to its advantage
"As long as the AfD is ignored by many media or is belittled with targeted 'fake news,' this can be the only way," Focus quoted AfD leader Alice Weidel as saying.
The AfD newsroom staff members are expected to work in shifts round the clock, with three members dedicated to research and spotting topics that Weidel alleges "are swept under the carpet." These are to be "cleaned up journalistically and edited for the public."
The far-right party entered the Bundestag for the first time last year after it picked up almost 13 percent of the vote in September's federal election, finishing third nationwide. It is therefore set to become the main opposition party in the German parliament, given the decision taken on Wednesday by Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative bloc and the Social Democrats to form a grand coalition.
Campaigning in the modern age
The AfD will seek to leverage its significant presence on social media to disseminate its messages.
Around a month before the election, it emerged that the populist party had commissioned Harris Media, the consultancy group that worked on projects for US President Donald Trump's campaign during the Republican primaries.
A subsequent Oxford University study published shortly before the federal election found that the populist party drove almost one-third of all political Twitter traffic, more than any other party and more even than nonpartisan discussion.
Since then, however, the party has fallen foul of Germany's new hate speech laws. Leading AfD figure Beatrix von Storch was one of the first people to be hit by the new regulations. After Cologne police tweeted New Year's greetings and linked to safety information in a number of different languages, including Arabic, von Storch took to social media to accuse the authorities of appeasing "barbaric, gang-raping hordes of Muslim men." Her account was subsequently suspended for 12 hours.
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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."
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
