Nfter the departure of the previous AfD chairman Jörg Meuthen from the party, the former CDU politician Erika Steinbach announced her intention to join. “The deliberately destructive exit of Jörg Meuthen, who is well off retaining his European mandate, is a slap in the face for many who stood behind him,” Steinbach said on Twitter on Friday evening. “The AfD didn’t deserve that. Therefore, I will now apply for membership.”
Meuthen had previously announced his departure. “Large parts of the party and with it a number of its leading representatives have opted for an increasingly radical course, not just linguistically uninhibited, for political positions and verbal gaffes that are driving the party into complete isolation and ever further to the political fringes,” reasoned the longtime party leader made his decision.
Steinbach (78), a long-time Frankfurt city councilor and member of the Bundestag and President of the Association of Expellees, left the CDU in 2017. She justified this, among other things, with the refugee policy of the then Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU). Since 2018, Steinbach has chaired the AfD-affiliated Desiderius Erasmus Foundation.
Meuthen: “I want a patriotic, but not a nationalist policy”
Actually, she had no intention of joining a party again, she wrote now. The “indisputable handling of the media and politics with the AfD” and the “incomprehensible, unfair exit” Meuthens would have made them rethink. She described the AfD as the “only bourgeois alternative” and “political glimmer of hope”. “As the last few months have clearly shown, extremist and anti-constitutional efforts have no place in the AfD,” said Steinbach.
After the announcement of his resignation, Meuthen spoke again in an interview and predicted that the party would be politically unsuccessful. “I believe that the AfD is developing in a way that does not promise any further political success in this country, because it is simply moving in a direction that does not give this success,” he said on Friday evening in ZDF’s “heute journal”. “And I have to tell you, based on my own positions: I think that’s right.”
“I want a conservative policy, not a reactionary one, I want a liberal one, not any arbitrary one, I want a patriotic policy, but not a nationalist one,” said Meuthen on ZDF. “These are the positions I have, and it is clearly going in a different direction, and from this I draw the logical conclusion that it can no longer be my party.”
With a view to the right-wing current around the Thuringian AfD head of state Björn Höcke, Meuthen said: “I have never made a secret of the fact that the positions that Björn Höcke represents are not my positions at all.” But if you do want to become a larger party, then try to integrate. “This integration course failed because they tried – and not entirely unsuccessfully – not to be “the wing” but, as someone very clever once said, the whole bird. And that doesn’t work.”
He tried to give the party “measure and middle”, said Meuthen on the television channel Welt. “Obviously, I wasn’t able to prevent myself from getting through with these appeals.”