It is also a middle finger to the federal executive board and the party leadership around Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla. In July last year, the federal executive board clearly warned against inviting the small Austrian right-wing extremist Martin Sellner to events. Also because the Federal Administrative Court recently made clear in a judgmentthat Sellner’s concept of “remigration” (i.e. racist expulsion policy of supposedly “unassimilated” citizens with a migration background) is unconstitutional.
The Kotré family probably thought: We don’t care, especially now. The Brandenburg Bundestag member Steffen Kotré and the Brandenburg state parliament member Lena Kotré, who is married to him, have invited Sellner to Luckenwalde and want to organize a lecture evening with him next Thursday. Topic in the Bundestag member’s constituency office: “Remigration – theory and practice”.
The Federal Executive Board is correspondingly annoyed. Officially, Weidel and Chrupalla did not want to comment. The taz, however, informed Weidel’s spokesman: “The state leadership is currently looking into the matter” – so they want to exert pressure so that the event is canceled again. However, the state chairman René Springer and the Kotrés have not yet responded to taz’s request.
The AfD Brandenburg, which has been one of the most radical state associations in the already extremely right-wing AfD since its founding, had already protested against the federal executive board last year regarding “remigration” and Sellner. After the party leadership recommended staying away from Sellner, they said at the time: “We’ll carry on as before.” And Björn Höcke also showed his middle finger by posing offensively with a Sellner book in response and saying that this “Till Eulenspiegel” should not be stabbed in the back.
Openly ethnic hosts
The hosts in the constituency office are also die-hard right-wing extremists: Steffen Kotré repeatedly appears as a Putin puppet on Russian (and German) television, and Lena Kotré dreams of a private deportation industry, wants to exclude refugees from public events and distributed melee weapons as campaign gifts. tightness Links to more militant right-wing extremists are no news for either of them.
Lena Kotré dreams of a private deportation industry and wants to exclude refugees from public events
Im Classification note from the Brandenburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution The name Kotré appears 40 times on 140 pages. Among other things, because Lena Kotré represents similar anti-constitutional positions as Sellner: At an event at the beginning of September 2024, she said “that naturalized migrants, if they do not recognize ‘our values here’, would have to ‘leave this country, just like the others'”. She wants to “question naturalizations” and reverse them, so she likes to use terms like “passport Germans” and “replacement migration,” thus distinguishing between good and bad Germans based on ethnic criteria.
Two years ago she had Correctiv-Search A secret meeting between AfD members, entrepreneurs and Values Union members with Sellner, which also discussed his planned measures against “unassimilated” citizens with a migrant background, triggered nationwide protests. Weidel then fired her employee Roland Hartwig, a participant in the meeting.
Since then, contact with Sellner within the AfD has also been a no-go. At the same time, the AfD tried to trivialize itself. She redefined the term remigration that had long been used in the extreme right – citizens should be taboo. Complaints by participants against the Corrective reporting largely failed.
Parts of the AfD, most prominently Maximilian Krah, have left, mind you, for strategic and pragmatic reasons and fear of being banned distanced from Sellner’s concept. Nevertheless, many AfDers continue to use “remigration” as a right-wing extremist fighting term with an allegedly different, constitutionally compliant definition – Alice Weidel also used the term in the federal election campaign a year ago. However, Sellner avoided a substantive debate with Krah, for example – whereupon they insulted each other either as “pussy” or “enemy witness”.
As a reminder: Sellner not only represents anti-constitutional concepts, he is also the head of the Identitarian movement. After all, it is officially on the party’s incompatibility list. How little anyone in the AfD cares about this was recently made abundantly clear by the founding of the AfD, which is closely linked to the Identitarians AfD youth organization Generation Germany. A former Identitarian also works in Bundestag office of the Brandenburg state leader René Springer.