Like Germany as a whole, Munich has shifted towards the right, and the political landscape has become more fragmented. The greatest vote winner in the city was the Green party (17, 2%) which managed to get more votes than the SPD (16, 2%). This was an enormous blow to the Bavarian SPD which was always a fairly insignificant political force in the countryside but very influential in Munich. In general, the city is becoming more polarized, with the AfD and Die Linke both getting 8, 3% of the vote (a considerable increase for both parties compared to the previous election).
I want to look at this relatively new phenomenon in postwar German politics on a local level. Petr Bystron is currently the head of the Bavarian branch of the AfD and was a candidate for a constituency in the north of Munich. He is now a Member of the German Parliament.
Bystron was born in 1972 to Czech parents. He was raised in Czechoslovakia until 1987. In ’87 he and his parents escaped to West Germany where they asked for and were granted asylum. Bystron finished school here and studied economy and international relations at the LMU (Ludwig Maximilian Universität). He started his political career with the FDP of which he was member from 2006 to 2013. He joined the AfD after leaving the FDP and was elected head of the Bavarian branch in October 2015, a position he still occupies.
Bystron doesn’t hide his past and likes to cite himself as living proof that the AfD isn’t hostile to foreigners. On his webpage he states that he wants to strengthen German borders, speed up the process of (not) granting asylum and enforce repatriation of asylum seekers who weren’t granted asylum. He also states that the situation of mothers and families ought to be improved, but makes no specific suggestions.
Unlike other smaller parties, the AfD doesn’t seem to lack funding. Before the election their posters could be seen everywhere in Munich. The AfD could even afford to rent large billboards to offer their party wisdom (“New Germans? -- We make them ourselves.” Accompanied by a picture of a heavily pregnant woman. “Colourful? We already are!” With a picture of three women in various German traditional costumes.).
Here in Bavaria the AfD also used a local political legend from another party for their campaign. They had a poster claiming: “If Strauß was alive he would vote for the AfD”. Franz-Josef Strauß was one of the most controversial politicians of the Sixties and Seventies, revered in Bavaria for propelling a backward, rural place into the 20th century, and hated almost everywhere else in Germany for his arch-conservative politics. Strauß famously said, “There will be no party to the right of the CSU”. His idea was to contain right wingers by giving them a “home” in the CSU. I’m sure Strauß would be spinning in his grave if he knew that the AfD was using him for their campaign.
Similarly, Petr Bystron used a well-known local politician from another party for his personal campaign. The text on his posters stated that Bystron ‘was doing in politics what [Christian] Ude was only writing about.’ Christian Ude (SPD), was the mayor of Munich from 1993 to 2013 and has recently published a book. Since Ude comes from the other end of the political spectrum, the claim on the poster not only seems misplaced, but -- considering Ude’s popularity as well as his long and successful career --also a tall order.
To get a better idea of the man heading the Bavarian branch of the AfD I looked at two speeches Petr Bystron held in public in 2017. Both speeches were part of the AfD’s election campaign. The first speech I looked at was held in Gera (Thuringia), the second one was here in Munich.
The speech Bystron delivered on a central square here in Munich is rather tame as his audience consisted of supporters as well as opponents (booing and heckling can be heard throughout his speech). In this speech Bystron talks almost exclusively about other parties. His criticism of the FDP is particularly interesting as he started his political career with the FDP: ‘They have an excellent advertisement agency which has done a brilliant job since it has managed to sell a party without the slightest bit of content.’ Members of the Green party he describes as ‘people in knitted jumpers and Birkenstock shoes who carry frogs across the road and seriously think they are making a contribution to the protection of the environment.’ Because the Green party was part of the SPD government under chancellor Schröder, Bystron says Germany is now “contaminated by left-green politics’. He is, however, hopeful for the future: ‘Liberal and conservative parties are on the rise everywhere in Europe.’
More revealing is Bystron’s speech on the campaign trail in Gera where the AfD later got 28, 5% in the general election (more than twice the national average). At the beginning of his speech Bystron claims to have been asked by a local whether he wasn’t afraid to come to Gera. ‘It is terrible, my dear friends, that people here only dare to come out after dark to say they’re supporters of our party. Such terrible conditions in a democratic country that we don’t dare to say we are supporters of a democratic party. This is worse than communism! He then tells the story of a man who allegedly lost his job after his boss found out he was a member of the AfD. A short while later Bystron is spotting political opponents all around them in the city centre (‘The AWO over there, the Linke party over there, and the SPD is probably just around the corner.’).(2)
Bystron quickly moves on to the Catholic Church: ‘I’ve always asked myself, how is it possible, that the Catholic Church – which has fought Islam for 2000 years – is now supporting the Islamisation of Germany. The Church has, of course, been streamlined as well.’ (3) After making this outlandish claim, Bystron neither elaborates on his theory nor does he make any attempt to prove it. (4) He then offers his very own explanation as to why politicians currently in power didn’t increase pensions and family allowances. ‘If they increased the pensions, if they increased the family allowances, YOU would get the money. But when the migrants come, then the money is given to the AWO, the Caritas and the whole Asylum Industry.’
Later Bystron voices his opinion that the situation in Germany today is comparable to life under Soviet rule: ‘An official truth is announced in the mainstream media, but the reality is completely different. During communism we were told the five year plan was completed successfully – and the next day you couldn’t buy loo paper anywhere. Today it’s the same with the EU and the Euro. They are all telling us the Euro is safe, but we all know the whole system is about to collapse.’
The most revealing of all his statements, however, is the one referring to Reichsbürger. (The Reichsbürger are a rather heterogeneous group who share the opinion that the procedure by which the Federal Republic of Germany was founded, was not legal. They refuse to recognize the Federal Republic as a state and therefore don’t regard Federal German law as binding. For a long time, the Reichsbürger were regarded as an extremist but harmless fringe group. This changed completely when a Reichsbürger in Bavaria shot and killed a policeman and wounded three more.) Bystron mentions the Reichsbürger when he’s criticizing the police: ‘Rather than safeguarding us from the threat of terrorism, the police are hunting down Reichsbürger. If somebody doesn’t believe the Federal Republic of Germany exists… well, that is his own business – I don’t feel threatened by that.’ In other words, in his opinion it is acceptable to regard current German law as not binding.
On the night of the election when it became clear that the AfD had got 12, 6% of the votes, some people in Munich organized a spontaneous demonstration against the AfD. One of the demonstrators was Dominik Krause, a local candidate for the Green party. His reason for participating in the demonstration was that ‘the AfD does not occupy a normal position in the political spectrum of a democracy. Some of their statements show they are moving outside the arena.’
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(1) Frankly I was astonished that he seems to regard the AWO as one of the AfD’s political enemies. The AWO is a state subsidized charity founded in 1919 to support workers. The AWO has mainly been aiding and supporting the elderly, the sick and the handicapped for decades now.
(2) On a local level, the AfD has been around longer. Munich had two AfD town councilors, but both left the party immediately after the party’s founder, Bernd Lucke, was ousted in 2015. Both councilors didn’t belong to any party for a while and then joined the new party Lucke founded (LKR) in 2015.
(3) Bystron actually uses the word “gleichgeschaltet” in German, a bizarre use of the term which used to be limited to all media being subject to complete government control during the Third Reich. I’m aware there is no such word as “Islamisation” in English, but Islamisierung is also a made up term.
(4) Bystron has repeatedly accused both Christian Churches, or rather their affiliated charities, Caritas and Diakonie, of making a lot of money from the refugee crisis. Unsurprisingly, representatives of both Churches have reacted very strongly to these allegations. The speaker of the German Bischofskonferenz, Mathias Kopp, for instance, has said that Bystron’s statements ‘are not based on a single fact.’ He added that ‘crude allegations like Bystron’s were a slap on the face of the 200 000 volunteers working with refugees in church affiliated charities.’
There seems to be another story behind Bystron’s allegations against the Catholic Church: Every two years the Central Committee of German Catholics organizes a large event called the Katholikentag. The event last 3-4 days, and people meet to discuss all kinds of subjects. Many speakers are invited and politicians from different parties often take part as well. Members of the AfD wanted to speak at the Katholikentag in 2016 but were deemed unsuitable.