The German parliament’s football team was adamant that it already had enough rightwingers. But FC Bundestag has been thrown into crisis after a Berlin court overturned a ban on members of the far-right Alternative for Germany from joining the squad.
In a microcosm of the fraught debate about how to handle the AfD — which last month claimed a historic second-place finish in federal elections — the club must now decide how to respond to the ruling and whether to allow the far right MPs to take part in its weekly matches.
“More than 20 per cent of the population voted for us and want us to be represented in different offices in the parliament — and also in FC Bundestag,” said Malte Kaufmann, an AfD Bundestag member 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 west German parliamentarians in the then capital of Bonn — a time when the main centre-left and centre-right parties together held more than 90 per cent of the seats.
They play weekly matches against other amateur workplace teams from business, culture and civil society, as well as an annual contest against other parliamentary teams from elsewhere in Europe.
Players over the years have included former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, former finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble and Joschka Fischer, the country’s first Green foreign minister. Two weeks before German reunification in 1990, the team played against members of the “People’s Chamber” of the communist east German republic.
The team has long framed itself as an opportunity for building cross-party co-operation on and off the pitch.
“If you have fought and sweated together and showered afterwards, then you will also come together differently in a [parliamentary] committee,” the then-team captain Klaus Riegert told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the occasion of its 40th anniversary in 2007.
But the club’s roughly 100 members have drawn the line at sweating and showering with the AfD, an anti-immigration, anti-EU party, large parts of which have officially been deemed a threat to Germany’s democratic order by the country’s domestic intelligence service.
The party’s 152-strong group in the next parliament includes figures who have described themselves as the “friendly face” of Nazism and played down the crimes of Adolf Hitler’s SS.
That is a red line for Kassem Taher Saleh, a Green lawmaker, who told the Financial Times: “I just don’t want to have to shower with Nazis, with right-wing extremists, with racists.”
The team last year decided to ban AfD members completely, after having previously allowed some lawmakers on a case-by-case basis and following careful vetting.
Captain Mahmut Özdemir, a member of the Social Democrats, said that the ban was prompted by last year’s revelation that senior AfD officials had held a secret meeting in which they discussed mass deportations, including of German citizens descended from migrants.
He described the story, and the mass protests that followed, as a “wake-up call” about the nature of a party that he said represented “deeply right-wing extremist values”.
The decision to ban the party from the squad, he said, was met with “great relief through the team and among the ranks of those who want to play with us”.
But the AfD reacted with fury and challenged the ban in court.
In its ruling against FC Bundestag, the Berlin court last week said that it was “irrelevant” whether or not there were “substantial reasons” for the decision. It said the move had violated the club’s own statutes, which say that membership should be open to any current or former member of the German parliament.
FC Bundestag now faces a dilemma: let AfD members back in or change its statutes.
But such a step would require a two-thirds majority of the members once the new Bundestag convenes for the first time next week. The captainship will be taken over by the Christian Democrats, who came first in last month’s elections.
At the time of last year’s ban, CDU player Fritz Güntzler voiced concern that excluding the AfD only “enhances their status” by amplifying their anti-establishment arguments. André Hahn, from the hard-left Die Linke, said it allowed the AfD to “play the martyr.”
Taher Saleh, whose east German state of Saxony is an AfD stronghold, dismissed that idea, saying that the party would play the victim no matter what. “The AfD is a victim of coronavirus, of the climate debate, of wind turbines, of the football club,” he said.
Regardless of how the AfD portrayed it, the party must be excluded, he argued. “The AfD may have been democratically elected, but for me the AfD is not a democratic party.”
The row goes to the heart of the debate in Germany about how to deal with a party that many critics are convinced wants to dismantle the nation’s democracy from within.
All mainstream parties still say they are committed to maintaining a “firewall” around the party by refusing to co-operate with it or allow it to join a coalition government at federal or local level.
A cross-party group of MPs led a push during the last legislative period to go even further, calling for AfD to be banned by the constitutional court. Several of those lawmakers have pledged to renew those efforts in coming years.
But many senior German politicians are highly critical of the idea. Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz has warned that it would be “grist to the mill” of the AfD.
Established parties are also gearing up for similar battles to the one playing out in FC Bundestag over the AfD’s claim that one of its members should take up the role of vice-president of the German parliament — as well as a string of key committee posts.
“Sport is always political,” said Martin Gross, a political scientist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, even if the row over the squad seemed trivial and the AfD was portraying it as “just football”.
Centrist parties feared that allowing the AfD on the pitch would mark the start of a slippery slope, Gross said. “That is the thing that they fear: that the AfD sees it as the next step towards normalisation. A small stone taken out of the firewall.”
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