What is the likelihood that four candidates and two reserve candidates of the same political party, in the same region, would drop dead suddenly, within 13 days of each other—and just before local elections? It happened in North Rhine-Westphalia to Alternative for Germany (AfD) candidates on the September 14 ballot.
The four candidates were Ralph Lange, 66; Wolfgang Klinger, 71; Stefan Berendes, 59; and Wolfgang Seitz, also 59. All were running for local offices in the northwest German state, where voters will go to the polls in less than two weeks. German election officials have invalidated previous mail ballots due to the deaths.
No foul play has been suggested, and local authorities pronounced two of the deaths as resulting from natural causes. Still, it is very strange that six men from a party despised by the German establishment—especially the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which has labeled the party “right-wing extremist”—would die under these circumstances.
To be sure, AfD isn’t a threat to win in these upcoming local elections. In North Rhine-Westphalia, the Christian Democrats are comfortably ahead of the pack, polling at 36%, followed by the Social Democrats at 23%. AfD is in third place, with just shy of 16%.
Still, the party has trebled its support there since the last election, and the establishment parties are running scared. Last week, all the political parties (except AfD) in Cologne, a North Rhine-Westphalia city of 1.1 million, vowed not to criticize migrants or migration during the campaign.
Under the so-called fairness pact, parties said they will “not campaign at the expense of people with a migrant background living among us” and will not blame migrants “for negative social developments such as unemployment or threats to internal security.”
This development is especially bizarre given that Cologne was the site of mass sexual assaults of German women by Arab and African men on New Year’s Eve 2015-16. According to German police, of the 153 suspects identified in the attacks, two-thirds were from either Morocco or Algeria, 44% were asylum seekers, and another 12% were probably in Germany illegally.
Yet political elites in the very city where these atrocities took place have gagged themselves for the greater good of Germany. This leaves AfD as the only party willing to talk about migration as a problem—if their candidates survive the next two weeks.
Since 2022, when the Russia-Ukraine war began, Germany has accepted two million refugees—enough to fill two cities the size of Cologne. Since the Syrian war crisis of 2015, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to those fleeing the war, Germany has taken in between 10 million and 15 million migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Germany’s total population is around 84 million. According to official statistics, almost 20% of the German population is foreign-born or born in Germany to foreign-born parents.
A January national poll showed that two out of three Germans believe the country should have permanent border controls, with 57% wanting to refuse all foreigners without proper papers—even asylum seekers.
After the last national election, AfD became the second-largest party in the Bundestag, but all other parties refuse to work with its members. Meanwhile, the latest national polling shows AfD running neck-and-neck with the declining Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union coalition. The party of Chancellor Merz is at 26% in the polls, with AfD at 25%. The Social Democrats are a distant third, at 15%.
At CPAC Hungary this past May, AfD leader Alice Weidel cut loose on the German political establishment.
“Desperately clinging to power by all means has become the primary concern of our establishment politicians,” she said. “Driven by panic, they bend laws, manipulate the constitution, and eliminate the fundamental rights of the parliamentary opposition in order to prevent a democratic transfer of power. The current government continues a war on free speech started by its predecessors.”
And now, in a major German city, the same establishment has decided that if they don’t talk about the very issue most on the minds of German voters, it will go away. This seems to be the strategy of establishment politicians elsewhere in Europe.
In Great Britain, the Labour government cracks down hard on Britons who object to mass migration while largely turning a blind eye to Islamic radicalism. On Sunday, British police arrested a woman for hanging a Union Jack from a balcony at an anti-migrant protest. On the same day, Labour education secretary Bridget Phillipson said on national TV that the government cares more about the rights of asylum seekers than the welfare of British people concerned about having them in their neighborhoods.
It’s as if the entire political elite of many European countries have lost their minds. In a time of widespread loss of faith in public institutions, politicians like the Cologne confederates and the Labour cabinet minister are driving sane people into despising their ruling classes. For example, a 2024 OECD poll found that almost half of Germans had little or no trust in their government, and 56.9% of Britons shared the same negative view of their own government. Results are similarly dire in many European countries.
It must be hoped that the unfortunate and statistically unlikely deaths of four politicians from a party the German government is considering outlawing were nothing more than a fluke. The alternative is too frightening to contemplate seriously.
But when Thierry Breton, a former member of the powerful European Commission, dared to say on television this past January that if German voters choose badly—that is, elect an AfD majority in the Bundestag—that the EU was prepared to annul the election (“We did it in Romania, and obviously we’ll do it in Germany”)—well, the difference blurs between people who are paranoid and those who simply pay attention.
AfD: Appointed for Death?
An election campaign placard of Alternative for Germany (AFD) party reads “Say what is. Do what helps. Keep promises” in Ueckendorf district, Gelsenkirchen, western Germany on August 27, 2025. On 14 September 2025, local elections will be held in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous federal state.
Ina Fassbender / AFP
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What is the likelihood that four candidates and two reserve candidates of the same political party, in the same region, would drop dead suddenly, within 13 days of each other—and just before local elections? It happened in North Rhine-Westphalia to Alternative for Germany (AfD) candidates on the September 14 ballot.
The four candidates were Ralph Lange, 66; Wolfgang Klinger, 71; Stefan Berendes, 59; and Wolfgang Seitz, also 59. All were running for local offices in the northwest German state, where voters will go to the polls in less than two weeks. German election officials have invalidated previous mail ballots due to the deaths.
No foul play has been suggested, and local authorities pronounced two of the deaths as resulting from natural causes. Still, it is very strange that six men from a party despised by the German establishment—especially the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which has labeled the party “right-wing extremist”—would die under these circumstances.
To be sure, AfD isn’t a threat to win in these upcoming local elections. In North Rhine-Westphalia, the Christian Democrats are comfortably ahead of the pack, polling at 36%, followed by the Social Democrats at 23%. AfD is in third place, with just shy of 16%.
Still, the party has trebled its support there since the last election, and the establishment parties are running scared. Last week, all the political parties (except AfD) in Cologne, a North Rhine-Westphalia city of 1.1 million, vowed not to criticize migrants or migration during the campaign.
Under the so-called fairness pact, parties said they will “not campaign at the expense of people with a migrant background living among us” and will not blame migrants “for negative social developments such as unemployment or threats to internal security.”
This development is especially bizarre given that Cologne was the site of mass sexual assaults of German women by Arab and African men on New Year’s Eve 2015-16. According to German police, of the 153 suspects identified in the attacks, two-thirds were from either Morocco or Algeria, 44% were asylum seekers, and another 12% were probably in Germany illegally.
Yet political elites in the very city where these atrocities took place have gagged themselves for the greater good of Germany. This leaves AfD as the only party willing to talk about migration as a problem—if their candidates survive the next two weeks.
Since 2022, when the Russia-Ukraine war began, Germany has accepted two million refugees—enough to fill two cities the size of Cologne. Since the Syrian war crisis of 2015, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to those fleeing the war, Germany has taken in between 10 million and 15 million migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Germany’s total population is around 84 million. According to official statistics, almost 20% of the German population is foreign-born or born in Germany to foreign-born parents.
A January national poll showed that two out of three Germans believe the country should have permanent border controls, with 57% wanting to refuse all foreigners without proper papers—even asylum seekers.
After the last national election, AfD became the second-largest party in the Bundestag, but all other parties refuse to work with its members. Meanwhile, the latest national polling shows AfD running neck-and-neck with the declining Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union coalition. The party of Chancellor Merz is at 26% in the polls, with AfD at 25%. The Social Democrats are a distant third, at 15%.
At CPAC Hungary this past May, AfD leader Alice Weidel cut loose on the German political establishment.
“Desperately clinging to power by all means has become the primary concern of our establishment politicians,” she said. “Driven by panic, they bend laws, manipulate the constitution, and eliminate the fundamental rights of the parliamentary opposition in order to prevent a democratic transfer of power. The current government continues a war on free speech started by its predecessors.”
And now, in a major German city, the same establishment has decided that if they don’t talk about the very issue most on the minds of German voters, it will go away. This seems to be the strategy of establishment politicians elsewhere in Europe.
In Great Britain, the Labour government cracks down hard on Britons who object to mass migration while largely turning a blind eye to Islamic radicalism. On Sunday, British police arrested a woman for hanging a Union Jack from a balcony at an anti-migrant protest. On the same day, Labour education secretary Bridget Phillipson said on national TV that the government cares more about the rights of asylum seekers than the welfare of British people concerned about having them in their neighborhoods.
It’s as if the entire political elite of many European countries have lost their minds. In a time of widespread loss of faith in public institutions, politicians like the Cologne confederates and the Labour cabinet minister are driving sane people into despising their ruling classes. For example, a 2024 OECD poll found that almost half of Germans had little or no trust in their government, and 56.9% of Britons shared the same negative view of their own government. Results are similarly dire in many European countries.
It must be hoped that the unfortunate and statistically unlikely deaths of four politicians from a party the German government is considering outlawing were nothing more than a fluke. The alternative is too frightening to contemplate seriously.
But when Thierry Breton, a former member of the powerful European Commission, dared to say on television this past January that if German voters choose badly—that is, elect an AfD majority in the Bundestag—that the EU was prepared to annul the election (“We did it in Romania, and obviously we’ll do it in Germany”)—well, the difference blurs between people who are paranoid and those who simply pay attention.
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