Stora tråden om AfD

Marcel Yaron Goldhammer, a dual German-Israeli citizen and a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, who ran on the ticket of the far-right AfD, or Alternative for Germany, has failed to win a seat in the German parliament.

Goldhammer, a male model, belongs to a growing minority of Jews in Western Europe who have joined the ranks of the populist right because of its nationalist ideals and its opposition to Muslim immigration. They believe left-wing movements threaten the future of European culture, as well as that of the continent’s Jewish minority.

At a political rally in Berlin in June, a young Jewish gay man wearing a turquoise kippah launched his campaign to represent one of Germany’s most ethnically diverse constituencies in parliament.

Goldhammer belongs to a growing minority of Jews in Western Europe who have joined the ranks of the populist right because of its nationalist ideals and its opposition to Muslim immigration. They believe left-wing movements threaten the future of European culture, as well as that of the continent’s Jewish minority.

Germany May Soon Pay Millions to Far-Right Operatives
A pending court case could force Berlin to fund the AfD’s foundation.

JUNE 15, 2022, 11:55
BERLIN—For four years, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has petitioned the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, for state funding to expand the operations of its affiliated political foundation. It has been rejected each time. But now, with a critical case before Germany’s constitutional court, the AfD might finally prevail.

The German government allocates hundreds of millions of euros annually to the foundations of major political parties, which operate similarly to think tanks. Only the AfD and its Desiderius-Erasmus-Stiftung (DES) remain outside this lucrative arrangement. On May 19, the Bundestag’s budget committee confirmed that the DES would once again not receive public money this year.

The decision is backed by the German Institute for Human Rights, which said that “a foundation that spreads racist and right-wing extremist ideas … should not be supported by the state as a matter of principle.” DES chair Erika Steinbach issued a stinging rebuke, accusing the committee of acting illegally. “The budget committee has taken it upon itself to determine who is democratic. This is pure arbitrariness,” she wrote, threatening legal retribution.

There is growing concern among civil society groups that the legal basis for the DES’s exclusion has weakened considerably since Germany’s federal election last September—and that Steinbach’s threats could have consequences. An AfD legal petition is currently lodged at the constitutional court, which may soon overturn the budget committee’s decision.

The disbursement of state funds to political foundations is not codified inGerman law. Since the postwar era, it has been dictated instead by parliamentary custom, roughly in proportion to a party’s performance in recent federal elections. A 1986 constitutional court ruling found that “all lasting, important political currents” should be entitled to their share, and this rather vague definition was nailed down—most recently by a 2020 ruling from the court—to mean a political party that enters the Bundestag for at least two consecutive terms by meeting or surpassing its 5 percent electoral threshold.

The AfD cleared this hurdle last year with 10.3 percent of the vote, a worse result than its 12.6 percent in 2017. Though the party’s fortunes have waned even further this year, it shows no signs of falling below the 5 percent threshold anytime soon and is likely to be a fixture of German politics for
years to come.

In its appeal to the constitutional court, the AfD said the foundation’s exclusion from funding violates “the right to equal opportunities for all political parties in political competition and the prohibition of arbitrariness.” Many AfD critics reluctantly admit that the party’s case has merit.

“There is no ideological restriction in the sense of the good ones get money and the bad ones don’t,” the political scientist Claus Leggewie said. “This doesn’t work in democracies. This is a legal party—it’s not forbidden.”

A paper Leggewie co-wrote before last year’s election found that once the AfD reentered the Bundestag, the exclusion of the DES from state funding would become “constitutionally difficult,” a position supported by other legal experts. This is despite the fact that since March, German domestic intelligence has had permission to surveil the AfD for suspected anti-constitutional activities.

By some estimates, the AfD could be entitled to between 50 million and 75 million euros (about $52 million to $78 million) for the DES before the end of the parliamentary term in 2025, raising the surreal prospect that a foundation connected to the extreme right could receive enormous sums of money from the German state, which it could then use to undermine German and European democracy.