The AfD politician can be investigated again: the judiciary committee of the state of Thuringia has lifted its immunity.
The immunity of the Thuringian AfD chairman Björn Höcke has been lifted again. The politician announced this on Facebook. According to his own statements, it is the sixth time that the AfD politician has lost his immunity.
According to information from t-online, it is again about the initial suspicion of hate speech. The public prosecutor’s office in Mühlhausen is now free to investigate the politician’s statements in October 2022. Höcke had written that Muslim immigrants were waging a “war of displacement”. Höcke claimed, among other things, that it was widespread among them to regard Germans as “a life not worth living”.
Act of violence in Oggersheim, Rhineland-Palatinate
At the time, the AfD politician was referring to an act of violence in Oggersheim, Rhineland-Palatinate: At that time, a man stabbed two 20 and 35-year-old men, and he also injured a 27-year-old. The police shot at the alleged perpetrator, a Somali.
The Nazis described sick and disabled people as a “life not worth living”. After this statement, there had been a plethora of complaints against Höcke, including by the lawyer Gisela Puschmann from the board of directors of the association promoting the “euthanasia” memorial in Hadamar. Her aunt was a victim of the Nazi murder of the sick. In addition, according to the public prosecutor’s office, Höcke’s statements should be understood as “incitement to hatred” against immigrants living in Germany.
“Tax Financed Antifa”
Höcke’s immunity was lifted in 2020 because of the same allegation. However, the AfD politician did not go into the specific case in his Facebook post. Instead, he speculated that “countless spies from the so-called ‘constitutional protection’ and informers from the tax-financed Antifa” were busy “constructing” allegations of hate speech from his speeches.
According to information from t-online, the federal state’s judiciary committee voted for the repeal with a total of one abstention. It is striking that three members of Höcke’s party are also on the committee.
The left-wing politician Katharina König-Preuss praised the repeal in an interview with t-online: “We constantly see that Höcke makes statements that border on hate speech. It’s good if you look closely that the borders are not torn down,” said the politician, who sits on the state parliament’s interior committee.
