AfD right winger Björn Höcke remains chairman of the Thuringian AfD. The 50-year-old was re-elected at a state party conference on Saturday in Pfiffelbach with 89.7 percent of the votes cast. Höcke announced that he would run as a top candidate in the state elections in 2024. "I want to lead you to the state elections in 2024 as the top candidate," he called out to around 250 Thuringian AfD members. "I want us to hunt down the establishment." They want to ask the question of power in 2024.
A new state parliament will be elected in Thuringia in 2024. Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow (left) announced on Friday that he would stand again. In an entry in his Internet diary, Ramelow wrote on Saturday that he didn't want to leave the field to those "who stir up fear with hatred and agitation, despise democracy and have no vision for a Thuringia of the future".
Certainly extremist
The Thuringian AfD is classified by the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a secured extremist effort. The President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, described Höcke as a right-wing extremist.
In the most recent Insa survey from September, the AfD in Thuringia was the strongest force at 26 percent, ahead of the left, which came in at 23 percent. In the 2019 state election, the AfD received the second-best result with 23.4 percent. After several exits, the AfD only has the third-largest parliamentary group in the state parliament in Erfurt, Höcke lost his role as opposition leader.
In a speech in Pfiffelbach, Höcke railed against the corona, refugee and crisis policies and declared: "Germany is not sovereign." Regarding the corona pandemic, he said that the fight for freedom in this, in his words, "plandemic" would not be given up "until those who owe and are responsible for millions of vaccination victims, until those are brought to justice".
Wants to "destroy liberal democracy"
He described his party as the "parliamentary arm of the popular opposition" against "warmongering". Höcke again called for an end to sanctions imposed on Russia for attacking Ukraine. “We still say yes to Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2,” Höcke called out to the AfD members.
Höcke praised the policies of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. "He is a role model, he is perhaps one of the last statesmen in Europe," he said. He likes to travel to Hungary to breathe freely. In Hungary you can express your opinion freely. Orban is seen by many in the EU as a right-wing troublemaker. He is repeatedly accused of violations of the rule of law.
The historian and director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, Jens-Christian Wagner, wrote on Twitter: "Anti-Western and anti-democratic conspiracy legends,
