Friday October 15, 2021
“Racist” views
AfD has close contacts with right-wing extremists
Only recently was the Institute for State Policy classified by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as right-wing extremist – because of “racist and biological perspectives”. Numerous AfD members apparently maintain some close contacts with the association. Among them are prominent MPs.
According to a report, around 70 representatives of the AfD have connections to the right-wing extremist Institute for State Policy (IfS) in Schnellroda in Saxony-Anhalt. As the MDR magazine reported “exactly”, it concerns members of the Bundestag, several state parliaments as well as functionaries and employees of the party.
According to this, numerous members of the East German AfD state associations and supporters of the formally disbanded, right-wing extremist “wing” of the party are related to the institute, which is regarded as a think tank for the so-called new right. Among them are leading and prominent party members such as Thuringia’s AfD state chief Björn Höcke, the former parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag, Alexander Gauland, and Saxony-Anhalt’s parliamentary group leader Oliver Kirchner.
The AfD member of the Bundestag Harald Weyel therefore employs the IfS managing director Erik Lehnert as an employee in his parliamentary office. Numerous members of the AfD youth organization “Junge Alternative” maintain contacts with the IfS and its environment, according to the MDR. Saxony-Anhalt’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the institute of the publisher Götz Kubitschek, who is considered one of the most influential figures of the new right, as a right-wing extremist group.
In the most recent report on the protection of the Constitution of the country, it is said that the IfS is “a leading actor” of the so-called New Right and shaped by “racist and biological perspectives”. It is directed against the free and democratic basic order. With the classification, the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution can monitor the institute with secret service means. This includes eavesdropping on telephones, reading e-mails and using informants.