CDU boss calls for clarification
Merz finds Aiwanger affair “highly unsavory”
08/31/2023, 12:15 p.m
For Friedrich Merz, the content of the anti-Semitic leaflet that Hubert Aiwanger’s brother is said to have written is “simply disgusting”. The CDU leader hopes that the allegations concerning Bavaria’s deputy head of government will soon be over. Aiwanger himself is publicly defending himself.
The CDU chairman Friedrich Merz has demanded full clarification in the affair of an anti-Semitic leaflet from the school days of Bavaria’s Deputy Prime Minister Hubert Aiwanger. “It’s a highly unsavory story,” Merz told the newspapers of the Funke media group. “I wouldn’t have thought it possible that 17 or 18-year-old students would still be writing something like this in the 1980s. It really needs to be fully elucidated.”
Free Voter leader Aiwanger wrote on Saturday that he had written the leaflet that the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on as a student in the 1980s. At the same time, however, he admitted that “one or a few copies” were found in his school bag. Shortly thereafter, Aiwanger’s older brother confessed to having written the pamphlet.
Bavaria’s Prime Minister and CSU boss Markus Söder, who governs together with the Free Voters, asked Aiwanger on Tuesday to answer 25 questions about the allegations in writing in a timely manner. A new state parliament will be elected in Bavaria on October 8th. Merz continued: “I hope that these allegations can be eliminated. It’s depressing and extremely irritating. What was written there – no matter by whom – just disgusting.”
“I’ve never been an anti-Semite or an extremist”
Most recently, Aiwanger publicly defended himself after further allegations had been made about his school days. The following message was published on Aiwanger’s account on the online network X (formerly Twitter) late Wednesday evening: “It’s getting more and more absurd. Another person claims that I had ‘Mein Kampf’ in my school bag. Who would come up with such nonsense!? ” The “Süddeutsche Zeitung” had previously quoted an unnamed former classmate of Aiwanger as having often carried Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” with him in his school bag. She can confirm this because she held the book in her own hands.
“I’ve never been an anti-Semite or an extremist,” said Aiwanger on Wednesday evening in Munich. “I don’t remember any allegations against me as a teenager, but they may be due to things that can be interpreted one way or another,” added the 52-year-old. Before that, the Bavarian Economics Minister had told the Welt TV channel in the presence of other journalists on the fringes of an appointment in Donauwörth: “It is definitely the case that perhaps in youth one or the other can be interpreted in one way or another, what is considered 15- year-old here is accused of me.”
However, he emphasized: “But in any case, I’ve been saying since adulthood, the last few decades: not an anti-Semite, not an extremist, but a philanthropist.” He could “put all hands on fire for the last few decades”. What is now being discussed from adolescence surprises him a little.