Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is now polling at an all-time high of 24% across Germany, making it the second-strongest party behind the CDU/CSU. It might sound good to be in first place, but the Union is polling at a mere 29%, historically dismal levels for it. New polls in the crucial states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Thüringen, which are set to hold elections in September, confirm that the AfD has established such ascendancy there as to make the arithmetic very awkward for establishment parties. There is now a serious possibility that the CDU will be forced to contemplate a coalition with the Left if it wishes to keep the AfD out of Government in Thüringen and Saxony. Because CDU rules forbid cooperation with both the Left and the AfD, this would cast the Union into serious internal crisis.
Many people, including some readers, have predicted that our rulers will resort to dirty tricks to solve their growing AfD problem. At least some of them seem to be desperately hungry for some pretence to ban the party. I regret to announce that the first such dirty trick has just happened. It was orchestrated by Correctiv, a non-profit ‘research centre’ and journalism operation financed variously by the German taxpayer and a vast tangle of Silicon Valley firms, NGOs and philanthropic funds, among them George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Correctiv engages in tedious fact-checking to combat ‘fake news’ (its efforts to defend the reputation of the Covid vaccines were truly prodigious) and otherwise produce long establishment-friendly articles under the guise of contrarian investigative reporting. Typical items – I have selected these entirely at random – include this piece on “how much air pollution costs Germany”, this one on an alleged “anti-Green smear campaign” funded by “wealthy backers” and involving “anonymously financed placards”, and this piece on “hacker groups, state actors and Telegram users” working to spread Russian “disinformation”. It is a clear Green, Leftist and Atlanticist operation.
On January 10th, Correctiv published a long investigative piece on the ‘Secret Plan against Germany’, plainly crafted to reinvigorate demands for banning the AfD. The supposed revelations in the article have been the subject of breathless wall-to-wall media coverage for more than 48 hours now. In addition to this reception, the timing is highly suspicious, for it comes directly in the middle of the farmers’ protest, a moment of heightened crisis for the traffic light coalition. We have before us here an open and highly dishonest attack on Germany’s second most popular party, most likely coordinated with the highest reaches of the political establishment.
I will go over all of this in painful detail.
The ‘Secret Plan against Germany’ reports on a small conference devoted to the theme of “remigration” held at an old villa-turned-hotel in Potsdam in late November 2023. Among the two-dozen attendees were four AfD politicians and two members of the right-leaning CDU faction known as the WerteUnion, or the Values Union. The speakers included Martin Sellner, the Austrian identitarian activist whom Correctiv calls a “Neonazi”. Correctiv sent an undercover reporter to book a room at the hotel and planted various cameras outside for the purposes of snapping pictures of the participants.
The whole article is written in the breathless style of a spy thriller; it is very hard to put into words how embarrassing it is, and because it abounds with so much useless padding it is also very difficult to quote. So, I will spare you very many direct citations. The central contention is that Sellner and other attendees openly contemplated the deportation of “unassimilated” naturalised German citizens – a political programme that would likely violate the German constitution in its present form. The reporters draw many shamelessly unsupported connections to National Socialism; at one point we are reminded of the abortive Nazi plan to deport Jews to Madagascar and advised that “It is unclear whether Sellner had this historical parallel in mind”:
It may also be a coincidence that the organisers have chosen this particular villa for their conspiratorial meeting: The House of the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazis coordinated the systematic extermination of the Jews, is just under eight kilometres away from the hotel.
Indeed, the entire article is an effort to construct the Potsdam round-table as a kind of neo-Wannsee, even though nobody involved has any position in Government. Nor – despite the reporters’ constant suggestions to the contrary – was it any kind of AfD policy planning session or an occasion for outlining secret plans. All the supposedly scandalous quotations attributed to Sellner have clear analogues in his published work, but more on this point shortly.
There are a few points to make about all of this:
1) As I said above, the Correctiv article has provoked a massive firestorm across all establishment media, including multiple articles in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Welt, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel and countless regional papers. This partial collection of links from Google News should give you some idea of the scale of the reporting. As Michael Esders has pointed out – and as I can confirm after spending most of yesterday studying the coverage – all of the articles are remarkably similar in organisation and vocabulary. Coordinated reporting of this nature is always a very ominous sign that something is afoot, and it is unsurprising to find that renewed discussions of an AfD ban are now emanating from all quarters, including state media and the parties of the coalition Government. Suddenly the inconvenient farmers’ protest has been pushed to the back pages.
2) Martin Sellner is an Austrian and he has no position in the AfD. He is head of the Austrian Identitäre Bewegung, or Identitarian Movement. The German Identitarian Movement stands on the little-known AfD “incompatibility list“, which delineates those organisations that party members are forbidden to associate with. AfD members can attend a conference with Sellner as a speaker, but any formal identitarian associations will result in their expulsion from the party. The reason is that the AfD are explicit civic nationalists:
[T]he AfD is unconditionally committed to the German nation as the sum of all persons who possess German citizenship. Regardless of a person’s ethnic and cultural background or how recently or long ago they or their ancestors were naturalised, they are just as German in the eyes of the law as the descendants of a family that has lived in Germany for centuries, and enjoy the same rights and have the same obligations. For us, there are no first or second-class citizens.
All of this attenuates the relevance of this private Potsdam meeting for the question the AfD’s legality.
3) There is nothing illegal or unconstitutional about demanding the deportation of migrants; no less a person than Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently called for “deportations on a wide scale”, and the AfD has made no secret about its immigration scepticism. The only substantive point in the Correctiv article is the allegation that Sellner and others contemplated deporting naturalised citizens. The problem is that there’s no evidence anybody in Potsdam expressed these sentiments at all, and plenty of evidence that they didn’t. Martin Sellner has vigorously denied that he advocated deporting citizens. The newsweekly Junge Freiheit has contacted various participants, and all have likewise disputed how Correctiv characterised their discussion. If you don’t trust AfD-adjacent papers, the more moderately conservative liberals at Cicero have done their own research and come to the same conclusion:
Cicero spoke to several participants at the event independently of each other. These include the lawyer Roland Hartwig. He was once an AfD member of the Bundestag and is now Alice Weidel’s personal adviser… He calls the reporting on this simply “utter nonsense”. Sellner did not advocate the mass expulsion of German citizens: “And if he had done so, I would have protested because it would have been unconstitutional.”
This was also confirmed by CDU member Ulrich Vosgerau, another participant at the event. The lawyer and private lecturer at the University of Cologne was invited to take part in the round table for the first time. He claims: “At least in my presence, nobody said anything like that. What was actually discussed was the question of how to deport criminal foreigners or rejected asylum seekers more quickly. But even the Chancellor is thinking about that.”
4) The Correctiv reporters will not say how they came upon their quotations from meeting participants. Their undercover reporter had no direct access to the event and was able to speak to participants only in passing as he encountered them in common areas. A curious thing about all the quotations Correctiv provides is that they are very short, generally less than ten words. One has the strong impression that this is an account reconstructed from notes taken by an undisclosed informant.
However that may be, it is full of distortions and inaccuracies. Here is the breathless Correctiv summary of Sellner’s speech, stripped of all extraneous journalistic commentary. Note how little content there is once you do that:
Sellner takes the floor. He explains the concept in the course of the lecture as follows: there are three target groups of migrants who should leave Germany. … He lists who he means: asylum seekers, foreigners with residence permits and “non-assimilated citizens”. In his view, the latter are the biggest “problem”.
[T]here is no fundamental criticism of the idea of the “masterplan” in the group; there are many supportive questions. Only some doubted its feasibility.Silke Schröder, for example, a real-estate entrepreneur and member of the board of the CDU-affiliated German Language Association, wonders how this would work in practice. Because as soon as a person has an “appropriate” passport, [deportation] becomes “an impossibility”.
For Sellner, this is not an obstacle. He replies: you have to exert a “high level of pressure” on people to adapt, for example via “particular laws”. Remigration is not something that can be done in a hurry; it is “a project that will take decades”.
There are two big problems here. First, Correctiv appears not to understand that “remigration” is an umbrella term Sellner applies to a range of policies he thinks can reverse the consequences of mass migration. It is not the same as “deportation”. Second, nothing directly attributed to Sellner touches on the deportation of naturalised citizens at all. These allegations are all in the superfluous Correctiv commentary that I have removed.
A long editorial Sellner wrote last August for Heimatkurier contains an extended discussion of how “remigration” might address naturalised but “unassimilated” citizens, and it allows us both to detect and correct the Correctiv distortions:
Remigration does not mean withdrawing citizenship on the basis of biological markers. These are ‘straw men’ of the migration lobby intended to prevent a serious debate… As a first step, remigration aims to end the growth of unassimilated parallel societies by preventing further chain migration and radically reforming citizenship law. A policy that promotes a dominant [Austrian/German] culture and de-Islamisation; a consistent fight against clan crime… and the abuse of social entitlements create pressure to assimilate and remigrate. Of course, there will be no ‘second-class citizens’ or even deportations of German citizens, as malicious critics repeatedly claim. In addition to this elimination of ‘pull factors’, financial incentives to emigrate create ‘push factors’. Local aid and the establishment of attractive transit zones in African countries can also provide a ‘non-European pull factor’ that increases the emigration rate… Of course, these measures… are intended for a time frame of more than 30 years. Reversing the migration valves by preventing further unwanted migration and promoting desired emigration will definitely prove effective in the long term.
Now, whatever your view of these proposals, a few things are undeniable: incentives for unassimilated naturalised citizens to return voluntarily to their home countries are not necessarily unconstitutional in Germany. German tax law in its current incarnation is a great incentive for many native Germans to leave the Federal Republic, and nobody would suggest that this represents a human rights violation. More to the point, the Correctiv informant has simply garbled Sellner’s argument. The “project that will take decades” is not the mass deportation of naturalised citizens but the realignment of incentives to accomplish voluntary resettlement. That may make you uncomfortable! You may disagree! That’s totally fine! The point is, it’s not obviously illegal.
5) As Maximilian Krah points out, Correctiv receives substantial subsidies from the German taxpayer. This entire incident, in other words, arises from the covert surveillance of a private meeting by a state-adjacent ‘research centre’ that relentlessly defends the unpopular policies of the Scholz Government. A day after the Correctiv article appeared, Scholz crawled out from whatever cave he’s been hiding from the farmers in to scold Germans once again about the moral requirements of a pluralistic democratic society and the lessons of history:
We do not allow anyone to differentiate the ‘we’ in our country according to whether someone has an immigration history or not. We protect everyone – regardless of origin, skin colour or how uncomfortable someone is for fanatics with fantasies of assimilation. Anyone who opposes our free democratic order is a case for our domestic intelligence service and the judiciary. It is not just empty words to say that we must learn from history. Advocates of democracy must stand together.
Anette Dowideit, Chief Editor for Correctiv, immediately appeared in Scholz’s replies to thank him for promoting its ‘research’. “Please stay on top of the issue and don’t allow the AfD to escape by claiming that all this was meant in a much more harmless way.”
This entire fracas is malicious and idiotic in equal measures. None of it has any chance of hurting AfD support; if anything, the pseudo-controversy will drive it still higher in the polls. Nor does anything Correctiv reported even remotely support the case for banning the party, which would likely be highly counterproductive from the perspective of the regime in any case. Perhaps, instead of engaging in crazy conspiratorial plots to ban their political opponents, the traffic light clown car should try to govern for the benefit of German citizens and enact policies that are actually useful and popular. Or is that fascism now?
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