The constituent meeting of the AfD parliamentary group starts with a surprise. According to some MEPs, two of the new parliamentarians should not even be accepted into the group.
In a stormy first session, the new AfD parliamentary group was formed in the Bundestag.
Before the election of the new parliamentary group chairman, the parliamentary group discussed on Wednesday whether or not Matthias Moosdorf from Saxony and Matthias Helferich from North Rhine-Westphalia, elected for the first time, should belong to the parliamentary group. When the debate got heated, the group’s staff were sent out.
The cellist Moosdorf is seen by some AfD MPs as a “troublemaker” – especially since he expressed harsh criticism of the outgoing parliamentary group leader Alexander Gauland. Among other things, he had held against Gauland for “stubbornness” and too much understanding for radical failures by party friends.
Matthias Helferich from North Rhine-Westphalia was suspended from office during the election campaign. The background to the regulatory measure decided by the federal executive committee were statements in older chats. Helferich does not deny that he described himself as the “friendly face of the NS” in it. However, this term was merely a third-party attribution by left-wing bloggers whom he “satirized”, he explained.
«Extremist» also part of the group
Hannes Gnauck from Prenzlau in the Uckermark is one of the 25 new AfD MPs. During the election campaign he had announced: “I will continue to be uncomfortable (…). And no chancellor, no minister, no Herr Haldenwang and no politically instrumentalized secret service would ever be able to forbid me to be close to you, to my people. ” The Sergeant Major had been classified as an “extremist” by the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD). He announced that he would take legal action against it.
The two top candidates, Alice Weidel and co-party leader Tino Chrupalla, want to apply for the chairmanship together. Whether the MPs will be ready to choose the two as a duo is still open.
For the AfD there are 83 MPs in the new Bundestag, including eleven women. The AfD received 10.3 percent of the second vote in the Bundestag election on Sunday. It was thus below its 2017 result. At that time, 12.6 percent of voters ticked the box with the right-wing populists. This time, AfD candidates won 16 direct mandates – all in East Germany.
The outgoing parliamentary group leader Gauland will in future be a member of the parliamentary group as a simple member of parliament. Overall, he spoke of a good election result. However, not all group members see it that way. According to the participants, a majority followed the proposal of Rüdiger Lucassen, chairman of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, to put a discussion on the reasons for the loss of votes on the agenda. Lucassen called for an “analysis of the election campaign against the background of the election results and implementation of the findings in the future work of the AfD in the German Bundestag”.
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