Zoom Image
Travel agency boss Johannes Simon at the now dismantled AfD information table (here at the end of July)
Photograph:
Ilkay Karakurt / DER SPIEGEL
The tourism group TUI no longer wants to work with a travel agency in Hechingen, Baden-Württemberg, where advertising for the AfD is made. According to a TUI spokesman, two warnings have already been issued, and the blue group logo on the façade of the office must also be removed as soon as possible. "We do not accept political slogans in our sales environment. The next political poster will be followed by the termination of the agency contract," the spokesman emphasized, "we are keeping a close eye on the situation."
Johannes Simon, the 72-year-old owner of the travel agency, is an AfD local councillor in the small town and has turned his shop on the market square into a local contact point for the extreme right. In a back room, stacks of party brochures and right-wing populist advertising materials are stored. On a handwritten sign in his shop window, the head of the travel agency banned Green voters from entering the house and laid out leaflets in tabloid optics agitating against the traffic light government.
Simon has since removed the prohibition sign. The leaflets were recently collected by the state security during a house search. It is being investigated for insulting political figures against the AfD local politician. It has not yet been decided whether charges will be filed, said a spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in Hechingen.
In addition, at the beginning of August, the AfD member of the state parliament Joachim Steyer (Hechingen-Münsingen constituency) opened his constituency office on the premises. The contract is now "wastepaper", says travel agency boss Simon, he wants to work for a few more years and not mess with TUI. In the meantime, Simon has also removed an AfD information booth directly in front of his shop, with which he had incurred a lot of displeasure from other local councillors. For a small monthly fee, the city administration had granted him a special use permit. Even the Monday AfD demonstrations in the center of Hechingen, of which Simon is the chairman of the meeting, should no longer start in front of his travel agency.
KEK