German public broadcaster ZDF’s efforts to humiliate Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) leader Alice Weidel by ‘fact-checking’ her comments on crime have spectacularly backfired—it turns out that the broadcaster’s ‘fact-checking’ team got its facts wrong.
In an interview with ZDF, shown on Sunday, July 7th, Weidel—co-leader of the opposition anti-immigration AfD—discussed the irresponsibility of the current and previous German governments who let in hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants. “We have exploding crime statistics. We have exploding crime among foreigners, juvenile crime, migrant violence,” she said, adding:
How can a government treat its own people so irresponsibly? Look at the facts: rape is high, knife crimes are high, 15,000 in total last year. 111 gang rapes in Berlin alone. This crime rate cannot be justified. People are killed on the streets every day.
AfD, which finished second in the European elections in June and won a 16% vote share, has been rising in popularity mainly due to its relentless criticism of the government’s lax migration policies. The political establishment has placed a cordon sanitaire around the party, and the mainstream media is eager to portray the AfD as negatively as possible, with the intention of putting a dent in the party’s popularity.
The ZDF interviewer, Shakuntala Banerjee, “tried to expose her interviewee as a puppet of Vladimir Putin, as a blind fan of Donald Trump and as a contemptuous right-wing radical,” commented conservative publication Tichys Einblick, adding:
She doesn’t even succeed moderately well, because Alice Weidel may not be an exuberantly likeable person, but she is very professional. And she is clearly at least as intelligent as the person asking the questions. Her obvious aim to expose the AfD leader in the interview and to trick her into making spectacular mistakes, fails.
ZDF then attempted to dismantle Weidel’s remarks in an article by ‘fact-checking’ them, calling them “exaggerated,” and “not supported by facts.”
The broadcaster first claimed that there were 8,951 knife crimes in Germany last year, admitting it is higher than the 8,160 cases recorded in 2022. However, ZDF failed to take into account the 4,893 cases of robbery in which a knife was used—taking the number of knife-related crimes to almost 14,000, close to the count mentioned by Weidel. Although an updated version of ZDF’s article does correct the number, Tichys Einblick questions how a ‘fact-checker’ could have missed such an important fact: “Was it overlooked? Forgotten? Or knowingly left out?”
With regards to rape and the sexual assault of women, the number of cases has risen from 7,022 in 2015 to 12,186 in 2023, writes Apollo News. According to a recent report by Sunday paper Welt am Sonntag, 761 gang rapes were registered by the police in Germany last year, meaning an average of about two such violent crimes per day. There were 111 such cases last year in Berlin alone—the number referred to by Alice Weidel in the interview.
Yet ZDF intends to make a mockery of these official statistics, too. While acknowledging rising numbers, it quotes Tobias Singelnstein, professor of criminal law, who says that “police crime statistics are not the same as the reality of crime.” According to ZDF, “various factors may have led to an increase in the numbers in the statistics.” What these various factors are remains unanswered in the article.
The author of the piece, Oliver Klein, is likely to have faced some backlash, seeing as he quickly deleted his account on his X social media page shortly after the article was published. Moving forward, his newly created social media account will only allow the users he personally selects to comment there.
