The German Parliament’s soccer team was determined that it had enough rightists. But FC Bundestag was launched in a crisis after a Berlin Court annulled the decision that prohibited members of the far -right party AFD (alternative to Germany) to join the team. In a microcosm of the tense debate on how to deal with AFD-that last month has won a historic second place in federal elections-the club should now decide how to respond to the decision and will allow the far-right deputies to participate in their weekly matches.
“More than 20% of the population has voted for us and wants us to be represented in different positions in Parliament – and also in FC Bundestag,” said Malte Kaufmann, an AFD member at Bundestag who campaigned against the ban. “This is an example of how opposition rights are trampled in Germany.”
The team dates back to 1967, when it was founded by Western German parliamentarians in the then Bonn capital-a time when the main center-left and center-right parties together held more than 90% of the seats. They play weekly matches against other amateur teams from business, culture and civil society, as well as annual competition against other parliamentary teams from other parts of Europe.
Players over the years have included former chancer Gerhard Schröder, former finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble and Joschka Fischer, the country’s first-party Foreign Minister of the country. Two weeks before German reunification in 1990, the team played against members of the Chamber of the People’s Communist Republic of East Germany.
The team has long been present as an opportunity to build cooperation between parties on and off the field. “If you fought and sweated together and shower later, then you will also come together differently in a committee [parlamentar]”The then captain of the Klaus Riegert team told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung at the time of his 40th anniversary in 2007.
But about one hundred members of the club outlined the line in sweat and bathe with AFD, an anti-imigration and anti-ue party, large parts of which they were officially considered a threat to Germany’s democratic order by the country’s domestic intelligence service. The group of 152 party members of the next legislature includes figures that described themselves as the “friendly face” of Nazism and minimized Adolf Hitler’s SS crimes.
This is a red line for Kassem Taher Saleh, a green legislator, who told the Financial Times: “I just don’t want to have to bathe with Nazis, right -wing extremists with racists.” The team last year decided to completely ban members of AFD, after previously allowed some legislators on a case by case basis and after careful evaluation.
Captain Mahmut Özdemir, a member of social democrats, said the ban was motivated by last year’s revelation that high AFD officials held a secret meeting in which they discussed mass deportations, including German citizens descending migrants. He described the history, and the mass protests that followed, like a “calling awakening” about the nature of a party he said to represent “deeply extremist values in the right.”
The decision to ban the team’s party, he said, was received with “great relief by the team and among the ranks of those who want to play with us.” But AFD reacted with fury and contested the ban on court. In his decision against FC Bundestag, the Berlin Court last week said it was “irrelevant” whether or not there were “substantial reasons” for the decision. He said the measure violated the club’s own statutes, which say the adhesion must be open to any current or old member of the German Parliament.
FC Bundestag now faces a dilemma: letting AFD members go back or change their statutes. But such a step would require a majority of two -thirds of members as soon as the new Bundestag gather for the first time next week. The captaincy will be assumed by Christian Democrats, who were first in the elections of last month.
At the time of last year’s ban, the CDU (German-Christian Democratic Union) player Fritz Güntzler expressed concern that excluding AFD only “increases its status” by amplifying its anti-stablishment arguments. André Hahn, from Die Linke, from the far left, said this allowed AFD to “play the role of martyr.” Taher Saleh, whose state of Saxony in East Germany is a stronghold of AFD, ruled out this idea, saying that the party would play the role of victim anyway. “AFD is a victim of coronavirus, climate debate, wind turbines, soccer club,” he said.
Regardless of how AFD portrayed this, the party must be excluded, he argued. “AFD may have been democratically elected, but for me AFD is not a democratic party.” The dispute goes to the heart of the debate in Germany on how to deal with a party that many critics are convinced that he wants to dismantle the nation’s democracy inside.
All traditional parties still say they are committed to maintaining a “firewall” around the party, refusing to cooperate with it or allowing it to join a federal or local coalition government. A multiparty group of deputies led an effort during the last legislative period to go even further, asking AFD to be banned by the Constitutional Court. Several of these legislators have promised to renew these efforts in the coming years.
But many German senior politicians are highly critical of the idea. The future chancellor Friedrich Merz warned that this would be “water in the mill” of AFD. Established parties are also preparing for battles similar to that occurring in FC Bundestag about AFD’s claim that one of its members should assume the role of vice president of the German Parliament-as a series of key committees.
“Sport is always political,” said Martin Gross, a political scientist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, even though the team’s dispute looked trivial and AFD portrayed it as “just football.” Centrist parties feared to allow AFD in the field to mark the beginning of a slippery slope, said Gross. “This is the thing they fear: that AFD see this as the next step towards normalization. A small stone taken from the fire wall.”
