Rüdiger Schuch, president of the Diakonie charitable organisation of German Protestant churches, wants to terminate the employment contracts of those who simply vote for the right-wing populist AfD.
They don’t even have to be members of the party. So far as Schuch is concerned, Germans who vote for the country’s second highest polling political party “can no longer count themselves as part of the church, because the AfD’s inhumane worldview contradicts the Christian view of humanity.”
Diakonie is one of the largest employers in Germany, with around 627,000 employees and around 700,000 volunteers—many of whom, polling would suggest, might vote for the AfD. The charitable organisation runs about 33,000 hospitals, nursing homes, daycare centres, and other social service centres.
Journalist Jan Fleischhauer said that Schuch’s approach would itself contradict the Christian worldview, telling Die Welt that “the Christian way would be not to slam the door in people’s faces, but to start a conversation.”
German economist Adam Gwiazda added that while Diakonie “operates under the slogan ‘love in practice.’ Love of neighbor, however, does not apply to AfD voters,” while the AfD’s Frank C. Hansel bashed Schuch’s comments as “crazy!”
Government officials have long been considering how to keep the AfD ‘in check,’ fearing the potential ramifications of their “right-wing extremist” policies. These efforts have prompted numerous two-faced calls, such as CDU Marco Wanderwitz’s push for a ban on the AfD because they want “to destroy our free, democratic basic order.”
Schuch said that his comments were intended to dissuade Diakonie workers for voting for the AfD, but stressed that “if that doesn’t change anything, there will have to be consequences under labor law”:
Anyone who supports the AfD has to leave.
He explained that “anyone, for example, who describes immigrants as a threatening mass of people has no place at Diakonie.”
Junge Freiheit reported that the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany “unanimously approved the personnel decision.”
The section of German labour law in Basic Law that prohibits discriminating against employees because of their political views does not apply to private employers or churches. However, “once a person is an employee, he or she is protected in particular … against dismissal,” Volker Rieble from the Centre for Labour Relations and Labour Law said, adding that political and religious affiliation alone is not reason for dismissal—although aggressive agitation that disturbs the workplace could be:
The dismissal of an employee who reveals in his private life that he is voting for the AfD would not be valid in labour courts.
