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One of the German far-right’s most influential politicians has been convicted of purposefully using a banned Nazi slogan.
In a ruling on Tuesday evening, a court in Halle fined Björn Höcke, head of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the state of Thuringia, for invoking the nationalistic language of the Nazi’s paramilitary wing, the brown-shirted storm troopers.
Germany’s constitution bans the use of Nazi propaganda and symbols.
Judges rejected calls for a harsher, custodial sentence, imposing a penalty of €13,000 instead. Further legal negotiations over the coming week will decide whether Höcke will receive a criminal record.
Despite repeated controversies surrounding Höcke’s views and stance towards Nazism, polls indicate nearly one in three voters in Thuringia still intends to vote for the AfD in state elections in September.
This puts the former teacher in the leading position to become the state’s prime minister. Höcke is the figurehead of a hardline, nationalist faction within the AfD, which has steadily pushed the populist party further right in recent years.
After four days of evidence and multiple delays, the court in Halle found Höcke ended an incendiary 2021 speech in Merseburg with the words “Everything for Germany!” knowing it to be a rallying cry of the Nazi party’s storm troopers.
Prosecutors said it was neither the first time Höcke has used the phrase, nor alluded to it, and dismissed the politician’s claims that neither he nor his audience understood its historical context.
Höcke used known Nazi phrases “strategically and systematically”, said the lead prosecutor Benedikt Bernzen, and was seeking to make such language “socially acceptable again”.
The ruling comes the day after a long-running legal battle between the AfD and Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, closed, with a court in Münster on Monday ruling that investigators could classify the entire party as a “suspected” rightwing extremist organisation.
“You are an articulate, intelligent man who knows what he is saying,” said the presiding judge Jan Stengel. He said Höcke’s defence of freedom of expression was “strained” but believed that the remarks, though deliberate and provocative, were not premeditated.
Höcke’s Thuringia branch of the AfD is already designated as a right-wing extremist group, a classification which unlocks wide-ranging surveillance powers for the intelligence agency.
Höcke, 52, was, until its disbandment in 2020, leader of an AfD faction known as “the Wing”, which kept close ties with ethno-nationalist and identitarian thinkers and embraced revisionist views of Germany’s Nazi past.
In 2017 he provoked outcry when, during a speech in Dresden, he called the national holocaust memorial in Berlin a “monument of shame”.
The AfD’s then more moderate leadership failed in an attempt to have him expelled, however, and since then a more hardline ideology of the kind he espouses has been ascendant within the party — and increasingly popular.
Like Thuringia, the neighbouring states of Saxony and Brandenburg are due to hold state elections in September. They are also set to deliver wins for their branches of the AfD, even as controversies over radicalism mount.
In February, hundreds of thousands turned out to demonstrate against the AfD in cities across Germany after details of a meeting between party functionaries and ethno-nationalist ideologues to discuss forced deportations was revealed in an investigation by the news portal Correctiv.
The furore and a series of spying scandals, which have raised questions over the party’s friendliness to Russia and China, have eroded AfD support. But the party continues to poll strongly: one in five Germans still say they will vote for it, more than those who plan to vote for the social Democratic Party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
AfD politicians say they are being unfairly targeted by a censorious elite — a claim that has resonated among many Germans who feel the government in Berlin is out of touch amid a cost of living crisis and stuttering economy.
Höcke has tried to make his own case over the use of Nazi language a cause célèbre, and briefly last month attracted the attention of Elon Musk. After Höcke tweeted in English about his case, the businessman replied: “Why is this illegal?”
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