With 43.8 percent, the AfD achieved a historic result in the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt. Now the new parliamentary group with 39 members is meeting for its first parliamentary group meeting in the state parliament.
These also include some MPs who have become conspicuous in the past: police raids, Stasi activities and close ties to Russia.
Just ten days before the state elections, there were searches in several federal states on suspicion that the banned “species community” was continuing. This also affected two people from the north of Saxony-Anhalt who are now entering the state parliament for the AfD: Simon Lansmann (born in 1982) and Sebastian Koch (born in 1987), both from Gardelegen. They each denied the allegations through their lawyer.
According to the lawyer, a “private summer solstice celebration for invited guests” took place in June on a property managed by Lansmann in Gardelegen. The search warrant is related to this event. There is no membership in the “species community”. The group was banned by the Federal Ministry of the Interior in 2023. It was described as a “cult-like, deeply racist and anti-Semitic organization”.
Frank-Ronald Bischoff (born 1948), a former Stasi officer, enters the state parliament at number 33 on the list. The “Bild” newspaper had already reported on the Stasi past of the man from the Harz in 2017, when Bischoff wanted to enter the Bundestag. Shortly before the state elections, Saxony-Anhalt's state representative for coming to terms with the SED dictatorship asked Bischoff not to run for office.
Matthias Lieschke and Daniel Roi, two AfD politicians who were no longer part of the AfD parliamentary group for a time in the previous electoral period, have returned to the state parliament. Roi was expelled from the parliamentary group at the end of 2024 due to an irrevocably broken relationship of trust, but was reinstated around five months later. At the beginning of this year, Lieschke was accused of serious behavior that was damaging to the party and faction. He then sat as a non-attached member of the state parliament.
Several new MPs entering the state parliament are named in the current state constitutional protection report - including top party staff. The AfD is classified as a right-wing extremist movement by the Saxony-Anhalt Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The deputy state chairman Hans-Thomas Tillschneider and the co-party leader Oliver Kirchner are mentioned in connection with “xenophobic agitation”.
Sebastian Koch, the chairman of the AfD district association in the Altmark district of Salzwedel, is said to have been consistently noticed in right-wing extremist contexts since 2012 and to have taken part in a large number of events such as hero commemorations, wreath-laying events and concerts in the neo-Nazi scene.
AfD top candidate Ulrich Siegmund also took part in the now infamous meeting of right-wing extremists, AfD and CDU members in Potsdam in November 2023, at which the former head of the right-wing extremist Identitarian Movement in Austria, Martin Sellner, spoke about “remigration”. In the past, Siegmund has repeatedly referred to the meeting as a “coffee party”. Because of his participation, he was removed as chairman of the social committee in the state parliament in 2024.
AfD politicians have traveled to Russia several times in recent years, which has also led to criticism in the state parliament. MPs Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, Daniel Wald, Matthias Lieschke and Florian Schröder, among others, were involved in the trips, as can be seen from state parliament minutes. Tillschneider and Schröder were also invited to an event at the Russian embassy in Berlin last year.
