A party court has accused AfD politician Matthias Helferich of threatening members. In the ruling, which was passed star It also deals with contacts to old Nazis – and the alleged work of an AfD woman “as a prostitute”.
It was only half a year ago that the AfD in North Rhine-Westphalia sent Bundestag member Matthias Helferich as an assessor to its state executive committee. The election was a declaration of support by the delegates for the man who once described himself as the “friendly face of NS”, National Socialism. Helferich, 35, has close connections in the AfD, both in the party’s junior group “Junge Alternative” and in Björn Höcke’s camp.
A few months after his election, a majority in the state executive committee voted to expel Helferich from the party. At the end of May, a corresponding application was submitted to the state arbitration court. And the party court has now confirmed the party expulsion.
AfD arbitration court: Migrants “apparently equated with animals”
The decision of the regional arbitrators is nine pages long and is available to the star They accuse Helferich of various offenses. One of them is a post on Instagram. There, the Bundestag member published a photo of a rear-view mirror pendant with the quote “Out with the critters” and the words “Super” and “#remigration”.
The arbitration tribunal judges the post unambiguously: “The linking of the slogan ‘Out with the animals’ with the term ‘remigration’ shows an attitude of disqualification of migrants that is extremely degrading to human dignity and that is evidently equated with animals.” In everyday language, the word animal is “used in a derogatory way for an animal”.
The AfD court also accuses Helferich of having supported two AfD colleagues on the social network X. According to the arbitration tribunal, these had publicly expressed “that people of Turkish and Yazidi origin could not become Germans”. In doing so, according to the court, they had violated the Basic Law and the AfD’s basic program. Helferich, it is further stated, had adopted these views even though, as a member of the state executive committee, he knew that exclusion proceedings had been requested against the two party members.
“Threat scenarios” towards party friends
The largest part of the court order is taken up by what the two arbitrators describe as “actual or indirect/subtle threats to party members”. Helferich created “threatening scenarios”, repeatedly and deliberately placed “missteps or supposed missteps by other party members” and did so “in order to exert pressure”.
In its decision, the arbitration tribunal cites several examples of this, and the first of these delves deep into the power arithmetic of the AfD’s largest regional association. Andreas Laasch from Duisburg, head of the AfD’s Düsseldorf district with its large membership, is exerting increasing influence there. In 2019, “Spiegel” reported on Laasch that his name had appeared in a document from the right-wing extremist neo-Nazi party FAP, the Freedom Workers’ Party of Germany, in the 1990s. The FAP people from Duisburg wanted to go to a counter-demonstration at a May Day rally in Dortmund to “show the left-wing pack that we are not leaving the road to them”. According to the document, Andreas Laasch was also registered for “Vehicle 5”.
At the time, Laasch had assured that he had never had any contact with the FAP. The letter could “only be a forgery”.
“With excellent contacts to the old right”
In June 2024, when Andreas Laasch was elected AfD district chairman, Matthias Helferich spoke out on Platform X. He congratulated Laasch and wrote that AfD state chairman Martin Vincentz and federal chairman Tino Chrupalla had “in him a good networker – with excellent contacts to the old right and an undercover agent”.
“Excellent contacts with the old right,” which undoubtedly included the long-banned FAP: Unless Helferich is a braggart, he has insider knowledge of Laasch’s past. According to the state arbitration court, Helferich “boasted of having knowledge of the witness Laasch’s past.” And Helferich then used “this or other supposed knowledge” to threaten X by writing there, obviously addressed to Laasch: “If I were you, I wouldn’t overdo it tomorrow. You know your environment and your past best.”
The arbitration tribunal considers this to be a “punishable formal insult”
In January 2024, Helferich had commented in a WhatsApp group about an AfD woman from North Rhine-Westphalia who had represented her party in a prominent position for years. The arbitration tribunal is now also citing this case. The respondent, as he is called in the decision, boasted of having “knowledge of an alleged activity of the party member (…) in the past by claiming to have defended her activity as a prostitute and by saying: ‘Your recent hygiene, which suits you particularly well as a former prostitute …'”.
The state arbitrators clearly had high hopes for Helferich. In their opinion, in this case, “at least a criminal formal insult can be assumed.” And, they add, “there is also a threat that the defendant wants to use this supposed knowledge from the past of the (…) to their disadvantage at an appropriate point.”
“Best contacts with Putin’s Night Wolves”
Finally, in June 2024, Helferich attributed to former AfD Bundestag candidate Henning Zoz, an entrepreneur from South Westphalia, on X “excellent contacts with Putin’s Night Wolves and the eastern Ukrainian republics”. According to the AfD arbitration court, he did this “to damage his reputation”. Helferich “deliberately ignored the fact that party member Zoz is an entrepreneur with business relations in the Ukrainian eastern regions and has to operate on sensitive terrain there”.
The arbitrators see in Helferich’s statements the aim of “trying to put pressure on party members or their employees with irrelevant events or activities from their past”. According to the decision, Helferich, in turn, has rejected the accusations. He essentially defended himself “with extensive knowledge of actual or alleged misconduct by witnesses or people in their environment”.
Support from the Höcke camp
Helferich also pointed out that it is forbidden to restrict the formation of opinions within the party. This line of defense seems to be supported by the Höcke camp. In any case, the state parliament member Torben Braga, formerly Höcke’s spokesman and still his deputy as head of the Thuringian AfD, wrote on X in mid-June 2024 that if he had commented on Helferich, “then only in the following sense: According to everything I know, the PAV (party exclusion proceedings, the editors) initiated against Helferich is being conducted for the purpose or with the consequence of a massive restriction of inner-party democracy. This in itself is already a violation of the AfD statutes and should therefore be rejected as inadmissible.”
Matthias Helferich can submit an application to the AfD’s Federal Arbitration Court in Stuttgart to have his exclusion from the party reviewed. He is apparently not entirely alone at the moment.
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
