Tino Chrupalla is asked about Björn Höcke – and tries to distract

In the surveys, the AfD is the second strongest party behind the CDU/CSU two and a half weeks before the Bundestag election. Maybe despite, but maybe also because of politicians like Björn Höcke. The Thuringian AfD boss publicly represents right-wing extremists, winning the state election last year.

The AfD itself has a split relationship with Höcke. Party leader Tino Chrupalla had to be confronted with the people of his party friend’s folk views in the ZDF talk show by Markus Lanz-and obviously got going. He obviously did not want to make it his own, but at the same time he also struggled to clearly distance himself from it. This developed a tug of war between moderator and politician.

Based on the topic of migration and remigration, the declared political goal of the AfD, Lanz passed on some excerpts from Höcke’s book “Never twice in the same river”. The “Remigration project” will not be able to avoid a policy of well -tempered cruelty, “it says. In addition, there is talk of “human toughness and unsightly scenes”: “Even if we will lose a few parts of the folk that are too weak or not willing to oppose the progressive africanization, orientalization, Islamization. Once the turning time has come, Then we Germans don’t do any things. “

“I know that they would never say something like that,” Lanz again said to Chrupalla: “But this man who writes this is part of her party.” The AfD boss immediately pointed out that these statements “in no election program” of the party would be “other problems in the republic”-and started a diversion maneuver in the direction of the left-wing politician Gregor Gysi, whom he asked to deal with the Antifa.

“They want to provoke me,” he complained to Lanz. However, the AfD politician did not come from the hook that easily. “What does she stop to distance herself from these disgusting sentences from Mr. Höcke?” Asked the moderator. However, Chrupalla continued to show: “I did not make these statements, why should I distance myself from it?” And he tried again to have the conversation on the offenses, Lanz asked why he wasn’t distance from his ZDF colleague Jan Böhmermann. The moderator’s answer: “I am not his chairman.”

For Chrupalla, it would now mean to differentiate himself from the statements of Höckes to “knock a party colleague into the pan”. This is how the conversation in the circle turned-but even if Chrupalla did not want to take a clear position, it became clear that at least the AfD leadership does not want to go to the statements of Björn Höcke.