A 52-year-old former PE and history teacher from North Rhine-Westphalia has, in just a few years, become one of the most radical voices in the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. The son of a teacher at a school for the blind and a nurse, Björn Höcke was influenced from an early age by his family's stories about their roots in East Prussia, from which his grandparents were expelled by the Red Army. He has put this heritage to good use in his political career. His regular outbursts have done nothing to deter voters in Thuringia, a federal state in central Germany, who gave his party almost 33% of the vote in the regional elections on September 1, well ahead of any other party. However, the AfD has little chance of forming a coalition as the other parties don't want to associate with it.
Höcke emerged on the German political scene through his links with neo-Nazi circles and was elected to the regional parliament in Thuringia in 2014. From the get-go, he made unhesitating assertions about the legacy of Nazism, tinged with revisionism. In a speech in Dresden in January 2017, he described the Berlin Holocaust Memorial as a "monument of shame" and called on Germany to make "a 180° turn in its memorial policy."
"The big problem is that one presents Hitler as absolutely evil," he asserted in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2017. "But, of course, we know that there is no black and white in history." So far, the courts have considered his multiple borrowings from the Nazi lexicon to be conscious and deliberate, particularly when he was convicted in May and July for his use of the SA (a Nazi paramilitary organization) slogan "Alles für Deutschland" ["Everything for Germany"].
Although protected by his notoriety, Höcke does not have unanimous support within the AfD, whose leaders aspire to govern one day. His embarrassing remarks are a source of irritation, which partly explains why he has never dared to run for the party's federal leadership. In the press, party insiders point to his absences from the Thuringian parliament, which still pays him a €13,000 salary for being a group leader, according to Der Spiegel. His immunity as a member of parliament has been lifted nine times to allow him to be investigated, which has not hindered his career. His megalomania has also caused annoyance. Convinced that he has a national destiny, Höcke often invokes the myth of the Kyffhäuser, a Germanic legend according to which the 12th century emperor Frederick Barbarossa will one day awaken to lead the empire to new greatness.
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