Two weeks ago, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party announced that it would launch its European campaign on Saturday, April 27, in Donaueschingen (Baden-Württemberg), a peaceful Black Forest town near the Swiss border. The visuals printed ahead of the event featured three names: the party's two co-presidents, Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel, and MEP Maximilian Krah, AfD lead candidate for the European elections on June 9.
On Saturday, Chrupalla and Weidel were in Donaueschingen, but not Krah. Four days after one of his parliamentary assistants was arrested for allegedly spying for China, and three days after the courts decided to open two investigations against him on suspicion of funding from China and Russia, Krah was asked to stay away "so as not to influence the campaign and the party's image," as the AfD leadership put it. When his appearance was canceled, another candidate, Marc Jongen, fifth on the party's list for the European elections, replaced him on the visuals redesigned at the last minute.
While several hundred protesters gathered outside to condemn the AfD as a party of "foreigners, fascists and demagogues" or to rename it "Alternative for dictators," the speakers did not dwell on the topic, except to play the victim card. "For weeks now, our party has been systematically discredited and pilloried," said AfD co-president Weidel. Emil Sänze, president of the AfD Baden-Württemberg federation, echoed Weidel's claim: "We are facing a large-scale campaign aimed at smearing our lead candidate." "These days, some people are trying to lock the AfD inside a Chinese safe," said Austrian MEP Harald Vilimsky, a member of the far-right FPÖ party.
The AfD leaders present in Donaueschingen, determined not to let their lead candidate's setbacks get the better of them, could have devoted their speaking time to their program for Europe. Instead, they indulged in their favorite sport of castigating Olaf Scholz's government, suspecting it of "dragging Germany toward war" through its military support for Ukraine, criticizing it for having "shut down the last nuclear power stations out of pure ideology" at a time when energy prices were soaring, and accusing it of "leading the country to ruin" by "de-industrializing at breakneck speed."
Unsurprisingly, however, two issues most interested the 500 or so people gathered in the Donaueschingen Congress hall, where a large police presence had been set up. First, immigration: In the one-and-a-half-minute cartoon that serves as the AfD's campaign clip, the passage stating that "labor is not destined to arrive by rubber dinghy," accompanied by images of migrants landing on European beaches, was particularly applauded. Less so, however, than another, a few seconds later, which enthralled the audience: "We firmly reject gender ideology. Only women can become mothers, and men don't have to become women."
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