The AfD is riding a wave of success and allegedly wants to put forward a candidate for chancellor. But at times there is pure chaos at their party conference in Magdeburg.
From 6 p.m. on Saturday, the mood at the AfD’s European election meeting is at its lowest point. Heads of state walk through the Magdeburg exhibition center shaking their heads, some delegates pack up their things and flee to the hotel bar. But that’s not the end of it. Because after hours of debate, the AfD has not even put forward a handful of candidates for its list for the 2024 European elections.
Way too little, way behind schedule. But the party doesn’t get any further. She keeps failing on herself.
“Stupid,” says one delegate. “Completely undisciplined,” another. “They made fun of us,” grumbles one who would have liked to have been on the list. By far the most common sentence, however, comes from delegates and officials: “That’s totally crazy.”
Goebbels 2.0?
From the AfD point of view, the day had started well. With a clear majority of 65.7 percent, the Saxon and Höcke friend Maximilian Krah is chosen at noon as the top candidate for the EU elections. Krah is well connected in the extreme right-wing camp, but is highly controversial as a top candidate due to various scandals. However, there are no promising rival candidates and tough competition – contrary to what was previously expected.
The election for the second place on the list is still going smoothly. With Petr Bystron, the foreign policy spokesman for the AfD is running in the Bundestag. He applies with a speech full of anti-Semitic and conspiracy theory buzzwords, rails against the “poison from Brussels” and “globalists” in the EU Parliament who make secret agreements, against George Soros and Bill Gates. “We’re fighting the warmongers, the globalists who want to vaccinate us, want to dispossess, want to enslave,” he says.
Even for some in the exhibition hall, that’s too much. One secretly referred to Bystron’s speech as the “Sportpalast speech” – based on the famous speech by Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels. “Mini-Sportpalast”, say others – Bystron lacks the format, the content.
But given: Bystron remains unopposed and 82.4 percent of the almost 550 delegates choose him for the promising second place on the list.
After years of arguing between the more economically liberal and the völkisch camp, everything seems unusually harmonious so far for AfD conditions. Völkisch and as radical as possible – everyone seems to be able to agree on this common denominator.
In the afternoon chaos breaks out
But then chaos erupts – and it’s clear that just because the ideological direction is right doesn’t mean you have to pull together.
Again and again several people run against each other. No problem, that is explicitly desired in the AfD. Again and again, however, none of the candidates achieves the necessary majority of 50 percent, which is why elections have to be repeated again and again. For the first, for the second, even for the third and fourth time. And again and again the delegates give all proposed candidates a reminder and don’t tick a name, but the option “No to all”.
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The later the evening, the more complicated the situation becomes, the more often all the candidates fail, the worse the mood in the hall gets. You don’t make any progress for hours, instead of 8 p.m. as planned, you only end at 11:30 p.m. – and yet you haven’t even placed six candidates. The AfD blocks itself.
