“The rat Merkel at the top! This traitor to the people belongs in jail for life!” Who would one attribute such a statement to? A member of the Bundestag for the AfD. It comes from one of those. It is a message from 40,000 people in the chat community formed by the AfD parliamentary group in the past legislative period under the name “Quasselgruppe”.
At least 76 out of 92 parliamentarians have reported here. They utter nasty insults, indulge in fantasies of a coup (“We’ll have to wait until the old regime comes to an end economically and the sparks fly from Austria, Italy, France, etc. That will come and for the merciless fights that will also follow we prepare ourselves”).
Your own faction as a “chaos shop”
They express themselves as anti-women, anti-gay (e.g. against Jens Spahn) and racist. Above all, however, they deal with themselves and their party and faction leadership (“chaos shop”, “sleeping car board”), which appears to be completely incompetent.
The frippery that the AfD operates in the Bundestag (mutton jump and count late Friday afternoon) to annoy the other factions (“tormental strategy”) is applauded, but also criticized. A strategy is needed, warn more level-headed AfD MPs, and the call for a common line and those who formulate it is repeatedly heard. But there is nothing and there is nothing – except destructive comments. Everyone scoffs at everyone.
The chats are a document of presumptuous overconfidence, self-mutilation and destruction, an oath of disclosure. The chats were leaked to researchers from NDR and WDR. In a podcast and the film “AfD-Leaks: The secret chats of the Bundestag faction” (in the media library and on Monday at 10:50 p.m. in the first) they are spread.
The AfD deputy and representative of the “moderate” wing, Joana Cotar, clearly sets herself apart from the documented failures in the film, the right-wing frontman of the “wing” and former deputy Hansjörg Müller affirms the nationalist pathos that characterizes many chat posts and its Excesses have ensured that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution observes the party. Should the right-wing extremist Björn Höcke play an even greater role there than before, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution would have even more reason to pursue the anti-democratic tendencies of the AfD.
The faction leader Alice Weidel confidently smiles away at the allegations formulated in the chat posts, which are primarily directed against her personally. Anyone who is in the front row of the AfD, she says, is used to this. “They have to think about whether they might look for another hobby instead of wasting their time constantly writing in chats. I would like to see more involvement in parliamentary work,” says Weidel. If she had been aware of the statements submitted to her, she would have taken action against them. But Alice Weidel was not a member of the “chatter group”. Their name can represent the entire AfD. Nobody needs this party.