Anhörung Thüringer Landtag: Kerkeling: „Wir dulden keinen Faschismus in Deutschland“

Entertainer and grandson of a Holocaust survivor Hape Kerkeling accused the AfD party of constitutional unconstitutionality for downplaying the horrors of National Socialism in Germany. "Only their glossing over of the Nazi dictatorship makes them unconstitutionally intolerable," he said during an inquiry into an AfD ban procedure at the Thuringia Landtag in Erfurt.

"The promise of the state is: We will not tolerate fascism in Germany," Kerkeling declared, referring to the party and its leader Björn Höcke, who has been classified as right-wing extremist by the Landesverfassungsschutz. Kerkeling's grandfather was a Buchenwald prisoner, and the entertainer delivered a notable speech on the remembrance of Buchenwald's liberation in Weimar in April.

Kerkeling did not claim to be an expert in constitutional law but as a descendant of a victim of National Socialism. He stressed that Thuringia, where the NSDAP had dominated in the early 1930s and where Buchenwald is located, has experienced "how a democracy abandons itself when enough people look the other way." Kerkeling appealed to the politicians to initiate a procedure against the AfD, emphasizing that the defense of the Basic Law is not a matter of left or right, government or opposition.

The inquiry at the Justicia Committee of the Thuringia Landtag was attended primarily by constitutional experts and other specialists from the Institute for Human Rights or the Society for Freedom.