Far-right German politician to stand trial for use of banned Nazi slogan

BERLIN, Germany — A prominent member of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) will face trial for using a banned Nazi slogan in an election campaign, a court said on Wednesday.

Bjoern Hoecke, the AfD’s regional leader in Thuringia state, is accused of using the phrase “Alles fuer Deutschland” (“Everything for Germany”) during a campaign speech in May 2021.

The slogan was a motto of the so-called Sturmabteilung, a paramilitary group that played a key role in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

Along with the Nazi salute and other slogans and symbols from that era, it is illegal in modern-day Germany.

Hoecke will face trial in Merseburg in Saxony-Anhalt state, where he gave the speech to around 250 people in the run-up to Germany’s 2021 federal election, the regional court in Halle said.

Created in 2013 as an anti-euro outfit before morphing into an anti-immigration party, the AfD entered parliament for the first time in 2017 with around 13 percent of the vote.

File: Placards read “Bjoern Hoecke (Thuringia’s regional leader of the Alternative for Germany) is a Nazi” and “Love nature hate fascism” as people demonstrate against the European Election Assembly of the far-right party at the trade fair in Magdeburg, eastern Germany on July 29, 2023. (Ronny HARTMANN/AFP)

It slid to around 10 percent in the 2021 election.

But recent opinion surveys have put the party on 22 percent, above Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left SPD on 16 percent.

The AfD has benefited from growing discontent with Scholz’s three-party coalition amid concerns about inflation and the affordability of the government’s climate plans.

High immigration also remains a key voter concern.

The AfD caused a sensation in Hoecke’s stronghold Thuringia when it secured its first district administrator position earlier this year, in the town of Sonneberg.

The far-right party is polling around 34 percent in the state on the border with Bavaria, according to a recent survey by regional broadcaster MDR.

File: General view of the German federal state Thuringia capital Erfurt, Wednesday, July 5, 2023. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Thuringia will hold a vote for its regional parliament in September 2024, and Hoecke has voiced ambition to become the region’s state premier.

Far-right firebrand Hoecke has caused outrage before with his statements on Germany’s Nazi past.

Considered an extremist by German intelligence services, he has called Berlin’s Holocaust monument a “memorial of shame” and urged a “180-degree shift” in the country’s culture of remembrance.

As a former history teacher, prosecutors have said he uttered the phrase in full knowledge of its “origin and meaning.”

He was charged in June with “public use of a symbol of a former National Socialist organization.”