Since the AfD’s historic arrival into the Bundestag last fall, its members have maintained their relentless focus on immigration and refugees. They have sought to provoke their fellow members of parliament, even once taking what they described as “revenge” by invoking a procedural rule to shut down debate after one of them was rejected in a bid for a committee position. Recently, one AfD lawmaker took to Twitter to call a German tennis star’s son a “little half-Negro,” while another claimed police are pandering to “barbaric, gang-raping Muslim hordes of men” in Cologne. [...]
The AfD dilemma took on even greater importance after Merkel’s CDU, its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU), and their center-left counterpart, the Social Democrats (SPD), began formal talks on January 26 toward building a government in the coming weeks. Should they agree to form a “grand coalition,” the AfD, as the third-largest party in the Bundestag, would officially take on the role of chief opposition. Per tradition, this means it will have the first chance to respond to the government’s position during parliamentary debates, giving it extra airtime and visibility. It also gets the chairmanship of the powerful budget committee and a handful of other parliamentary committees. In other words, the AfD’s power to disrupt will only grow. [...]
Last October, for instance, the AfD nominated Albrecht Glaser, a man who has argued that Islam is incompatible with religious freedom, as its Bundestag vice president. In response, the other parties voted him down repeatedly, and the AfD has yet to fill the position. And just last Wednesday, AfD members were elected to lead the Bundestag’s budget, legal affairs, and tourism committees, after winning the required votes from members of each respective committee. The traditional parties did not interfere. [...]
Before the AfD’s arrival, Liebich told me he and many of his colleagues would begin their speeches in parliament by acknowledging their “dear colleagues”; nowadays, they tend to stick with the much more formal “ladies and gentlemen.” It was also once customary to announce that a member had just completed their first address to the Bundestag. But in an effort to mitigate disruptive reactions (like booing) from AfD members, that announcement now occurs before the speech, effectively leaving no room for applause or congratulations. “Even when I sharply criticize the CSU, they’re not my enemies—they’re people who have a different political position than me, but they’re my colleagues,” he said. The AfD members, he said, don’t feel like colleagues.
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