The public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt has launched an investigation into an incident that saw members of the left-globalist Antifa issue veiled incitements to violence against Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) candidates standing for the upcoming Hessian state elections after publishing their private home addresses.
The action, which gave rise to widespread condemnation, also prompted—likely for reasons having to do with optics—sharp disapproval from the Federal Ministry of the Interior, headed by Nancy Faeser, who previously wrote for an Antifa magazine managed by an organization with links to far-left extremism.
“It is absolutely clear that violence and threats can never be an acceptable means of a political dispute,” said Maximilian Kall, the spokesman for the Federal Ministry of the Interior, on Wednesday, August 9th, adding that now it was the task of law enforcement in Hesse to pursue the matter.
On Tuesday, October 8th, some two months before the state elections, with campaigning well underway, a group of extremists calling themselves Antifa-Frankfurt sought to physically intimate the conservative party by launching a website with the photos of some 40 Hessian AfD candidates alongside an interactive map that shows the location of the politicians’ private residences.
The map also pinpoints other locations, including restaurants and event rooms where the party’s local representatives regularly convene.
“The site is intended to encourage Antifas in Hesse to stop the AfD, which is currently becoming stronger again,” the group wrote on its website as it called on its members to “use the information.”
“With the following publication, we want to give an insight into the state list of the Hessian AfD and shed more light on the party’s politicians,” the statement continues.
Together with you, we want to dispute the spaces in which they move as a matter of course, feel unchallenged, and think they are safe. Whether it’s a restaurant, a club or a workplace: those who want to exclude, imprison, or dispose of others on the basis of a racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, and queer-hostile worldview should not complain about resistance and exclusion.
Andreas Lichert, the AfD’s leader in Hesse, called the website a thinly veiled attempt to incite violence against his party’s representatives. “What Antifa-Frankfurt is doing here is nothing more than a cryptic call for intimidation and violence against AfD politicians.” Such actions, he said, were literally incendiary. He added that it feels as if the party is being declared “illegal.”
Lichert said that he hoped investigations into the matter “won’t amount to nothing, as has been the case so often with state security investigations when there were attacks on the property of AfD politicians.”
“Trusting in the rule of law, we support the investigations to the best of our ability,” he continued, adding that it is an aspect of a well-fortified democracy to “take decisive action against such calls for violence.”
Hessian Interior Minister Peter Beuth and Justice Minister Roman Poseck, both members of the CDU, also sharply criticized Antifa’s action. In a joint statement, the two ministers said:
Antifa’s actions violate the principles of our peaceful democracy. The dispute with the AfD and its representatives must be conducted with political and peaceful means.
The AfD has filed a complaint and has called on the state security services to shut the site down. Authorities, meanwhile, have launched an investigation into suspicion of “public incitement to commit crimes, dangerous dissemination of personal data, and incitement to hatred.”
In 2019, 2020, and 2021, AfD politicians were attacked more frequently than those from any other party.
In light of this trend, which has largely gone unreported by Germany’s mainstream press and state-run media, the AfD’s youth wing, Junge Alternative, in Schleswig-Holstein recently started holding boxing lessons for its members so they can learn the skills required to protect themselves, as The European Conservative reported.
In a post to social media where it announced the new program, Junge Alternative wrote:
Attacks on German citizens in public spaces, but also on political activists, by left-wing extremist groups are becoming increasingly frequent. We took the opportunity not to bow to this and to be able to defend ourselves steadfastly in an emergency and met last week in South Holstein for boxing training.
