AfD distributes “deportation leaflets” for immigrants

Brussels – With just over a month to go before early elections, the xenophobic and supremacist AfD ultra-right has once again ended up at the centre of a political storm in Germany. This time, controversy erupted around the distribution among immigrant communities in Karlsruhe by the local branch of the post-Nazi party of fliers depicting fake airline tickets to urge recipients to leave the country.

The episode brought today (Jan. 14) to the opening of a file against unknown persons for “suspected incitement to racial hatred” by the city’s police, whose mayor accused the AfD of fomenting fear among communities, particularly minorities.

The flyers, found in the mailboxes of some neighbourhoods inhabited mostly by immigrants, explicitly refer to the “remigration” plans proposed by the far-right party—under which tens of thousands of immigrants were to be deported, and in opposition to which the Germans had taken to the streets a year ago—and are drawn like airline tickets, with the gate (AFD), the date of the flight (next February 23, election date) and the destination, i.e. a “safe country of origin.”

Marc Bernhard, AfD deputy from Karlsruhe, admitted on public TV that 30,000 flyers were printed, then distributed among campaign stalls and placed in mailboxes in some homes, but denied that residents with “foreign names” were specifically targeted. The co-chair of the party’s regional section, Markus Frohnmaier, praised “the creative action of the local sections.” On the Karlsruhe AfD website a page appeared (also taken up on X) in which an attempt is made to give explanations of the controversial communications move.

Deportation flyer

Below is the link to the flyer explaining the facts, which is distributed to all households in Karlsruhe. There you will also find the reverse side, which clarifies some of the things that are in circulation.

– AfD Karlsruhe (@AfD_Karlsruhe) https://t.co/5TXgxpitQT

A similar campaign had been organised, in 2013, by the then NPD, another German neo-Nazi party that now calls itself Die Heimat (“the homeland”) and which 12 years ago directed immigrant candidates for the Bundestag with fake airline tickets to discourage them. Both of these campaigns, moreover, are reminiscent of a similar operation orchestrated by the NSDAP, the National Socialist party of Adolf Hitler, which offered leaflets imitating one-way travel documents to Jerusalem to the Jews of Germany.

The AfD, which recently nominated the federal Alice Weidel co-chair as the candidate for the chancellery in a historically unprecedented move, has around 20 per cent support, according to polls. This would secure her second place after the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU/CSU)and ahead of the Social Democrats (SPD) of outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz. Against the post-Nazi ultra-right, however, it should hold up the cordon sanitaire of the democratic forces, which have promised not to entertain coalition negotiations with it.