Meuthen near Lanz
“Don’t sit the brightest candle on the cake”
By Marko Schlichting
2/10/2022 5:14 am
At the end of January, the ex-AfD boss Meuthen left his party. On Wednesday evening, the European politician explained his motives to Markus Lanz. In doing so, he violently lashes out at his former party friends, whose nationalist course he did not prevent as party leader.
Friday, January 28: In the afternoon, longtime AfD boss Jörg Meuthen announced his departure from the party. Then he gives interview after interview. He sharply criticizes his former party friends, especially the leading members of the former ethnic-nationalist “wing”, which is now considered dissolved. Meuthen is sitting with Markus Lanz on ZDF on Wednesday evening. He is particularly violent with the Thuringian AfD country chief Björn Höcke, whom he previously defended for a long time. He, Meuthen, tried to integrate the “wing”, he tries to justify himself. With that he failed. It becomes clear during the show: Meuthen and Höcke will no longer be friends. That has been significantly different in recent years.
“The decision to leave has matured over the long term”
Before Meuthen left the AfD, he announced last October that he no longer wanted to run for federal chairmanship at the next party conference. The party conference was originally planned for mid-December 2021, but then had to be postponed due to the corona pandemic. On January 5th, the administrative court in Cologne announced that on March 8th and 9th the classification of the AfD as a “suspected case” should be discussed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The procedure is also about whether the Office for the Protection of the Constitution may make this classification public. The AfD had sued because it believes that in this case it would have worse chances in elections. The upcoming court proceedings had nothing to do with leaving the party, says Meuthen at Markus Lanz. “The decision has matured over the long term.”
The AfD started as a bourgeois-conservative-liberal party. “I always wanted the party there,” says Meuthen in retrospect. AfD observers may have had some doubts about this in recent years, and not just since then-AfD chairman Alexander Gauland tried to relativize the Nazi era in Germany as “bird shit in history.” Meuthen explains it this way today: There have always been two parties in the AfD, the bourgeois-conservative and the ethnic-nationalist direction. He criticizes the latter today: “This course is completely weird and doesn’t work.”
But the fact is that Meuthen has repeatedly tried to come to terms with the right-wing extremist “wing”. He had saved his boss Björn Höcke from a party exclusion procedure. “That wouldn’t have worked,” Meuthen justifies himself today. Nothing is more fatal than a party exclusion procedure that goes wrong. In the end he would have been duped and Höcke the winner. Meuthen literally: “What Höcke says is underground and out of the question, but the man knows what he’s saying. He may not be the brightest candle on the cake, but he’s a history teacher.”
“I was a commander without troops”
And so it goes happily on. He, Meuthen, ensured that right-wing extremist party members like the former Brandenburg AfD head of state Andreas Kalbitz were kicked out, he says. That’s true, except that “Spiegel” had previously reported on the politician’s possible earlier right-wing extremist activities. Yes, he also gave a speech at a right-wing extremist Kyffhäuser meeting, but he later found it uncomfortable. Yes, he appeared at campaign events in East Germany in 2019, but only rarely.
He even wants to whitewash the rejection of his renewed candidacy for the election of the party chairman. For a long time he fought against the right-wing extremist current in his party. “Then I realized that the whole thing had no future because I was a commander without troops,” he says, before adding: “But I endured it longer than others.”
“I’m conservative”
Meuthen says nothing about his future plans at Lanz. Nor is he asked. “I’m a stock conservative, and what’s happening in this country shocks me deeply.” That’s the only thing that might hint at a possible future plan.
But in the last few weeks there has been one or the other speculation. He is apparently thinking about resuming his teaching position at the administrative college in Kehl, Baden-Württemberg. And he might want to start a new party. Nevertheless, the end of Meuthen’s political career is in sight. Because the success of a possible new party is rather questionable. In any case, other former AfD members who have tried to do so have failed miserably.