Germany and France: AfD young politicians with great power fantasy

He published a map on which both Germany and areas in other countries are colored blue, including Austria, areas in Poland and Romania and parts of Switzerland. Highlighted in light blue are parts of the French regions of Alsace and Lorraine. Strauf later deleted the post.

Those responsible for “Generation Germany” (GD), the AfD’s youth organization, on whose board Strauf sat until the weekend, only wanted to know about the article when asked by the taz. “It neither corresponds to our standards of historical politics nor our understanding of realpolitik,” said press spokesman Wendelin Nepomuk Fessl to the newspaper. The matter will be addressed at the next board meeting. On Saturday, the DG announced that Strauf was resigning from his position on its federal executive board “for personal reasons”.

Strauf applied for a place on the Munich city council in the spring

Strauf calls himself “Helmut”. He comes from Saarland but lives in Bavaria. There he sits as deputy chairman of the GD's state board. In the spring he applied for a place on the Munich city council for the AfD - at the time with the first name “Luca”. But Strauf was not elected.

This was different at the founding party conference of the GD in Gießen last November, where Strauf was elected as an assessor to the federal executive board of the AfD youth. Strauf had previously given a particularly radical speech in which he demanded: “We have to deport, deport, deport until Germany becomes a home again.”

Now one might think that a fantasy like the one Strauf spread on German Unity Day would trigger a bigger wave in France - especially at a time when the AfD is making headlines across the borders. It also takes less.

The French government did not react

The report from the taz was recorded on the website of the French think tank Le Grand Continent. The publication coincided with Frank-Walter Steinmeier's state visit to France. But outside the cosmos of X, the reactions to this remained relatively weak. The French government didn't react at all.

A statement was made by the President of the Grand Est region, which includes Alsace and Lorraine, among others. “If you consider what the people of Alsace and Moselle had to endure, this obviously triggers strong outrage,” said Franck Leroy of the center-right Horizons party, according to the newspaper Le Figaro. Strauf's post was "shocking and worrying" and showed a "lust for power." Let's see again what happens when nationalism returns.

The right-wing extremist Rassemblement National distanced itself

A prominent politician from the right-wing extremist Rassemblement National also came forward. Jean-Philippe Tanguy, the economic leader in Marine Le Pen's party, wrote on

You have to know that the Rassemblement National was allied with the AfD in the European Parliament until a few years ago. But when the Lepenists realized that certain positions of the German allies, such as “remigration,” were damaging their own strategy of so-called “de-devilization,” they broke with them. Since then, they have distanced themselves from the AfD at every opportunity, as Tanguy did.

The story wasn't really discussed on a large scale in France. In the TV talk show “Quotidien” on the TMC channel, which dealt with the topic, the participants pointed out that this Strauf was not a leading member of the AfD. But this was not meant as a trivialization of the nationalist nature of the AfD.