Green Party leader Banaszak warns against electing an AfD state parliament president in Saxony-Anhalt

Green Party leader Felix Banaszak sees the expected election of an AfD state parliament president in Saxony-Anhalt as a turning point. “For the first time since 1945, a right-wing extremist will be at the head of a German parliament,” he said in Berlin.

Banaszak emphasized that the election would take place even though the AfD did not win an absolute majority of seats in the state election, but because another faction was helping the candidate - meaning the BSW. “An electoral alternative to the AfD has become an electoral initiative for the AfD,” he commented.

The state parliament will be constituted in Magdeburg on Tuesday. Then the presidium should be re-elected. The AfD MP Tobias Rausch would like to become President of the State Parliament; the AfD parliamentary group has nominated him unanimously. The BSW wants to elect Rausch. The Greens, SPD and Left clearly reject an AfD parliamentary president. According to parliamentary group leader Sven Schulze, CDU MPs are recommended to abstain. The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is classified as right-wing extremist by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

It is foreseeable that an attempt will be made on Tuesday to make democracy contemptuous and to humiliate other parties and factions, Banaszak predicted. «I say to those who will be celebrating there tomorrow: Don't rejoice too soon. You don’t get our fear, you don’t get our resignation and our fatalism, but you do get our democratic resistance.”

Banaszak announced that he would travel with other members of the Greens' federal executive board to Saxony-Anhalt's state capital Magdeburg, where protests are planned for the election.