AfD wants to nominate soccer world champions as a candidate for the federal presidential election

According to WELT information, the AfD will nominate former national player and soccer world champion Thomas Berthold as a candidate for the office of Federal President. Official advice and a decision on this will not be made until Saturday at a conference between the federal executive board and the state chairmen, as the dpa news agency reports.

It had previously been said that it would be a “man from the middle of society”. At the 2022 Federal Assembly, the AfD nominated the former head of the Values ​​Union, Max Otte, who was therefore later expelled from the CDU.

During his career, Thomas Berthold played for Eintracht Frankfurt, FC Bayern and VfB Stuttgart, among others. The defender played 62 international matches. In 1990 he became world champion in Italy with the German national team. After his career, he worked, among other things, as manager of Fortuna Düsseldorf and as an expert for several television stations and magazines.

During the corona pandemic, the 62-year-old appeared as a critic of the measures taken at the time. These were “completely exaggerated,” he told the dpa news agency in 2020. In a speech at a “Lateral Thinking 711” event in Stuttgart, Berthold stated, among other things, that his trust in the political leadership had reached “below zero”.