ILooking back, everyone is smarter, including the 18 men who met on February 6, 2013 in the Oberursel Evangelical Community Center to found a new party. It started right from the start. There was controversy over the name of the party because some felt it sounded too nationalistic to call the party “Alternative for Germany”. It should rather be called “Alternative for Germany and Europe”, i.e. AfDE. This was then dismissed, but one could see that the concern, which later came true, was widespread among the founders before the party even existed. And before they could claim to outsiders that it was completely unfounded.
There were also intrigues from the start. When the party was founded, everyone wanted to leave, when Bernd Lucke realized that they had forgotten something: the party didn’t have a seat. Which one should they take? The place of residence of the newly appointed treasurer Norbert Stenzel in Bad Nauheim? That sounded like province. Then someone who lived in Berlin got in touch and offered his mailbox as a party seat. All agreed. They wanted capital flair.
It wasn’t until later that Lucke thought that a party that had its seat in the mailbox of someone he didn’t know well at all might look dubious. So Lucke changed the party seat in the Bad Nauheim statutes, without consultation, without a vote. Of course that wasn’t right. Some sensed their chance to oust Lucke because of a formal error. They called a meeting. There was a big argument, which Lucke was only able to escape by apologizing and making a sheepish call to the Federal Returning Officer. The tone was set.
Henkel couldn’t believe his ears when Gauland put the annexation of Crimea into perspective
When the industry lobbyist Hans-Olaf Henkel joined the party a year later, some things struck him as strange. At one of the first party congresses, party founder Alexander Gauland downplayed the invasion of Crimea by Russia as “collecting Russian soil”. Henkel, the old transatlantic, couldn’t believe his ears, but he dismissed it because other things seemed pleasing to him, for example the election program for the European elections. That contained hard sentences about deportation and integration, but it also stated that immigration was fundamentally necessary.
On paper, the AfD was not as radical as the mood that one could perceive in it. The leaders in particular stuck to paper, while the radicals simply drifted and waited for their opportunity. Then came the party conference, and a woman named Beatrix von Storch managed to turn the mood against a free trade agreement with the Americans with a speech about chlorine chickens. That was of course a heavy blow for an economic liberal like Henkel, and he noticed how fickle and emotional the members could be. Should they have looked less at the letters and more at the people to see the abysses?
A man with a Germany sash at the founding party conference of the AfD, who was photographed and filmed with preference at the time. It later turned out that he was a German from Russia who only spoke broken German.
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Image: dpa
There were dilemmas that were not so easy to resolve. For example in growth. The AfD grew like crazy, there were basket full of membership applications that had to be processed by completely overwhelmed board members. From today’s perspective, one could say that they should have taken the time and care to ensure that no radicals were getting in. It wasn’t that easy back then: Newly founded parties don’t immediately get something from the party funding. It takes years and many state elections before the flow of money is stable. Before that, a party only had one source of money besides donations: membership fees.