The Thuringian spy boss’s inflammatory assertion that the 16 million citizens who support the conservative, antiglobalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party represent the “brown dregs” of German society could potentially have legal ramifications.
In the wake of last week’s statements made by Stephan Kramer, the head of the Thuringian State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, where he smeared one-fifth of the German population as fascist scum, Thuringia’s AfD chief Björn Höcke, who represents the right-wing faction of the party, has filed a criminal complaint against the state spy boss for incitement to hatred, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports.
For Höcke, Kramer’s statement is a “clear violation” of Section 130 of Germany’s Criminal Code. “Anyone who incites hatred against parts of the population and attacks the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously scorning, or slandering a group or part of the population is liable to be prosecuted,” Thuringia’s AfD boss wrote on Twitter.
Höcke continued,
In an interview, Stephan Kramer denounced 20% of the population as “brown dregs. ” This is a clear violation of the paragraph mentioned. That’s why I filed a criminal complaint against him today.
Stephan Bradner, the AfD’s deputy federal spokesman, reacted similarly and argued Kramer’s comments, in a functioning democracy, would have resulted in him being dismissed from his position.
“Whoever feels the need to insult voters who are rightly afraid for their livelihood, their house, their job or their prosperity as ‘brown dregs’ only shows what kind of person he is. Bradner said. “In a functioning democracy, such a head of authority would have been dismissed long ago.”
Others outside of the AfD, including politicians from the liberal Free Democrats Party (FDP) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), have criticized Kramer’s comments as well. Wolfgang Kubicki, the First Deputy Leader of the FDP who also serves as the Vice President of the Bundestag, said he found Kramer’s remarks “irritating” because such “general exclusions could quickly be grist to the AfD’s mill.”
The party “will rub their hands in satisfaction when state institutions announce that they have written off one-fifth of the population anyway,” Kubicki claimed.
Georg Maier, Thuringia’s SPD chairman who serves as the state’s deputy prime minister, also expressed dissatisfaction with Kramer’s hateful remarks, calling them “somewhat unfortunate. He argued that confronting the AfD’s idea should be done so with “factual language,” not through defamation.
Meanwhile, Kramer appears to be unphased by the criticism and even went so far as to double down on his “brown dregs” statements in a recent interview. While speaking with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Kramer said: “The statement is admittedly provocative and pointed, but that’s how it was meant.”
“Beyond the classic definition of right-wing extremism, a larger proportion of the population than we think is on problematic paths,” said Kramer, adding that his comments were an attempt to “describe a trend.”
Kramer’s comments came last week, both in response to the AfD’s historic breakthrough in Sonneberg, which he called an “alarm signal” for democracy, and to national polling data which for some time now has consistently revealed that around 20% of the German population supports the AfD.
