2024-03-11 16:47:17
After a scandal surrounding a leaked WhatsApp message from Nicolaus Fest, an AfD arbitration tribunal has now approved his expulsion. Fest wants to defend himself against it.
The Berlin AfD’s regional arbitration court has expelled European MP Nicolaus Fest from the party at the request of the federal party. This is reported by “Welt”, citing excerpts from a corresponding judgment. The reason for this is membership fees for his mandate in the European Parliament, which the party owes.
According to the party’s financial regulations, AfD MEPs must give eight percent of their monthly MP compensation to the party. This corresponds to 806 euros of the monthly salary of 10,075 euros that MEPs receive. According to “Welt”, Fest has not paid this contribution to the party since July 2022.
“Finally this dirty pig is gone”
The reason for this is apparently that Fest felt betrayed by his party: He justified the payment stop in an email to the AfD federal office from January 2023 with a leaked message from an internal chat group of AfD members of the European Parliament. On the day of the death of the President of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, in January 2022, Fest wrote about him: “This dirty pig is finally gone.” The ARD capital studio heard about this news.
According to “Welt”, Fest also wrote in the email that the AfD’s top candidate for the European elections, Maximilian Krah, claimed to MPs from European partner parties at a dinner in July 2022 that AfD leader Alice Weidel had leaked the screenshot to ARD . He then told co-boss Tino Chrupalla that Krah was either slandering Weidel or he was right. A spokesman for Weidel denied this to “Welt” last year.
Firm: “Procedure should cover up intrigue against me”
The AfD regional arbitration court’s ruling is not final, writes Die Welt, because Fest will submit an application for review to the Federal Arbitration Court. The MEP told the newspaper: “The sole purpose of the procedure is to wipe out an intrigue against me by the two federal speakers and Mr. Krahs.”
Fest also suggested that the unpaid membership fees, which the arbitration tribunal used to justify his exclusion from the party, were just a pretext. “However, the court formalistically focused essentially on the elected representatives’ fees and did not want to see the obvious abuse of the party exclusion process,” he said.
Fest has been a member of the European Parliament since 2019. He led the AfD delegation there until February 2023. Between January 2020 and March 2021 he was chairman of the emergency board of the AfD Berlin. Until 2014, Fest worked as a journalist for “Bild am Sonntag”.