Germany's largest provider of outdoor advertising Ströer has announced that it will no longer accept orders for party-political advertising.

The company justified the move on Wednesday in a message with personal hostility and threats against its employees, calls for boycotts and property damage to company property from various political and social circles of opinion.

The provider of around 300,000 advertising spaces sees itself “arbitrarily and inappropriately politically close to the AfD” due to current media inquiries from a research association. The "limit of what is acceptable" is thus definitely exceeded. Behind the research network, which Stöer did not specifically name, is Correctiv, which published its request via the short message service Twitter. 

In August, a campaign against the Greens, for which Ströer had also booked advertising space, caused quite a stir. Green posters with sunflowers suggested at first glance that it was advertising for the party. But next to the sunflowers you could read about “Climate Socialism”, “Ecoterror” or “Totalitarian”. The Greens were outraged. The SPD and CDU also criticized the campaign called “Green Dung”. It was commissioned by the Hamburg entrepreneur and AfD sympathizer David Bendels. However, a direct connection between the campaign and the AfD has not yet been proven.

Ströer is neither authorized nor organizationally in a position to have the contractor's financing method for orders presented and to check them, the company said. In addition, as a marketer of billboards, the company is not responsible for the respective content and design of the advertising: “As a neutral service provider, all orders have so far also been carried out in the field of party-political advertising, as long as there is no illegal content - even if it does not match the political The opinions of the decision-makers at Ströer agree. "

Ströer has so far seen it as his "social obligation to contribute to a functioning, free and democratic basic order by enabling party-political communication in public space".

However, such a range of services is only possible on the basis of a “social consensus”.

The company does not currently see this as a given.

However, Ströer does not want to rule out the fact that there will be no election advertising on the company's premises in the future either.

A prerequisite for this is a political consensus that can be achieved at the round table initiated by Ströer with the political parties of the German Bundestag.