Hape Kerkeling accuses the AfD of being unconstitutional because of Nazi relativization

The entertainer Hape Kerkeling has accused the AfD of being unconstitutional because of its relativization of National Socialism. "In my opinion, their euphemistic attitude towards the Nazi dictatorship alone makes them unconstitutional," he said at a hearing in the Thuringian state parliament on a possible AfD ban procedure. "Anyone who trivializes and refutes this country's criminal past forfeits any political raison d'être in our democracy."

Kerkeling appealed to MPs to use the state government's influence in the Federal Council to initiate ban proceedings. “This signal has to come from here, of all places, from the country where history has taught its bitterest lessons,” he said. The defense of the Basic Law is not a question of left or right, government or opposition, Kerkeling told the MPs.

Kerkeling said he was not speaking as an expert in constitutional law, but as a descendant of a victim of National Socialism. In April, the entertainer gave a highly acclaimed speech at the commemoration of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald near Weimar, to which his grandfather, like tens of thousands of other people, had been deported by the National Socialists. The Left parliamentary group invited him to the first hearing in a state parliament on a possible AfD ban procedure.

At the hearing in the Justice Committee of the Thuringian State Parliament, constitutional lawyers and other experts, such as those from the Institute for Human Rights or the Society for Civil Rights, had their say. It was the first such hearing in a German parliament. Only the Bundestag, the Bundesrat or the federal government can submit an application for a party ban procedure to the Federal Constitutional Court.