In the run-up to the European elections, the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) is facing a succession of bad news. Two investigations have been opened against the party's lead candidate, MEP Maximilian Krah, suspected of illegally receiving money from Russian and Chinese sources. Then, two judgments were handed down within 24 hours of one other, confirming that the AfD – credited with 15% to 17% of voting intentions for the June 9 EU ballot – is not a party like any other.

On Tuesday, May 14, the leader of the AfD's radical wing, Björn Höcke, 52, was fined €13,000 by the court in Halle (Saxony-Anhalt, central Germany) for "using a distinctive sign of an unconstitutional and terrorist organization."

Höcke was on trial for having declared, in 2021, at a rally organized by the party in the small neighboring town of Merseburg: "Everything for our homeland, everything for Saxony-Anhalt, everything for Germany!" The problem is that "Everything for Germany" ("alles für Deutschland") was the watchword of the Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers, SA), the paramilitary militia of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party. And, according to paragraph 86 of the German penal code, using slogans or symbols of the Third Reich in public is forbidden.

During his trial, which began on April 18, Höcke claimed to be unaware that this was a Nazi slogan. The claim was "neither credible nor comprehensible," said Halle public prosecutor Benedikt Bernzen on Tuesday, pointing out that the defendant is a former history teacher and "obviously has a good knowledge of Nazi vocabulary." On March 16, 2016, Höcke was at an AfD rally in Erfurt, Thuringia, a state in the former East Germany where he has been a regional MP since 2014. There, he called Sigmar Gabriel, then minister of the economy and president of the Social Democratic Party, a "corrupter of the people" (Volksverderber), a term used by Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, to refer to Jews.

In sentencing Höcke to a fine of €13,000, the Halle court fell well short of the prosecutor's request for a six-year suspended prison sentence. Nevertheless, the ruling serves as a reminder that the AfD leader's credentials in Thuringia are rooted in the darkest years of German history. Even more than for his borrowings from what philologist Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) had called the "language of the Third Reich," Höcke is known for a speech he gave in Dresden (Saxony, eastern Germany), in January 2017.

"To this day, our state of mind is that of a defeated people," he had declared. "We Germans are the only people in the world to have planted a monument of shame in the heart of its capital" – a reference to the Shoah Victims Memorial, inaugurated in 2005, in Berlin. "We need a 180-degree turn in our memorial policy," he added that day, calling for a "positive vision of our history," so that the German people can mourn "their victims" of the Second World War.

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