German state set to lift immunity for right-wing AfD leader Frauke Petry

August 17, 2017

A parliamentary committee in the eastern state of Saxony reached a unanimous decision on Thursday to recommend that Frauke Petry’s immunity from prosecution be lifted on the grounds of suspected perjury.

Petry, the co-head of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and top state lawmaker, also requested her immunity be lifted during the committee’s hearing.

Read more: German prosecutors seek to lift immunity of nationalist lawmaker Frauke Petry

The decision now clears the way for the state prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against Petry, after investigating the matter for over a year. Petry herself requested during the hearing that the committee clear the way for the charges to be brought and has maintained her innocence.

Should no state parliament member contest the committee’s decision within the next seven days, the decision to lift Petry’s immunity will be final. As AfD members also took part in the committee’s vote, it’s not expected that the decision will be contested.

The AfD’s secretary-general, Uwe Wurlitzer, welcomed the committee’s decision, saying that the investigation will only end up clearing Petry’s name.

Read more: 10 things you need to know about Germany’s right-wing AfD

Conflicting testimony

Petry is suspected of lying under oath in November 2015 when she and fellow AfD member Carsten Hütter are alleged to have given conflicting testimony on the AfD’s candidate list and campaign financing ahead of Saxony’s 2014 state election.

The accusations concern loans that AfD candidates in Saxony gave to the nationalist party in order to support its campaign in the eastern German state. The AfD was then accused of taking one candidate off its state list because he didn’t want to give a loan to the party.

Read more: AfD top candidate Alexander Gauland – Close Germany’s borders

In the subsequent parliamentary hearing on the issue, Petry and Hütter gave differing accounts on when Petry knew about the loans.

The AfD is expected to enter the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, for the first time in this September’s general election on an anti-immigration and anti-EU platform.

Last year, the party enjoyed high poll ratings around 15 percent, cashing in on dissatisfaction with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy.

Thursday’s decision is the latest blow to the party, whose popularity has slumped in the last year as several prominent AfD members have found themselves caught up in scandals. The AfD is currently polling at 8 percent, which is still down from last year but enough to put the party over the 5-percent threshold required to enter the Bundestag.

Read all DW content related to the German election here

rs/kms (AP, AFP, dpa)

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

Frauke Petry

German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must “use firearms if necessary” to “prevent illegal border crossings.” Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

Björn Höcke

The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame” and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year – leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

Alexander Gauland

Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team’s defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch – but people would not want “someone like Boateng as a neighbor.” He also argued Germany should close its borders and “suffer the cruel pictures. We can’t be blackmailed by children’s eyes.”

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

Beatrix von Storch

Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts – but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. “People who won’t accept STOP at our borders are attackers,” the European lawmaker said. “And we have to defend ourselves against attackers.”

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

Marcus Pretzell

Alternative for Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia state chairman Marcus Pretzell, who is also Frauke Petry’s new husband, wrote “These are Merkel’s dead,” shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

Andre Wendt

The member of parliament in Germany’s eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) – the vast majority of them young men.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

Andre Poggenburg

Poggenburg, head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to “get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus” – the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.

Author: Dagmar Breitenbach