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The former head of the AfD state in Schleswig-Holstein, Doris von Sayn-Wittgenstein, has successfully sued her exclusion from the party.

On Thursday, the Berlin district court granted Sayn-Wittgenstein's lawsuit against the AfD federal executive board.

She remains a member of the party.

(Az 58 O 150/19)

The responsible civil chamber of the regional court did not initially provide a reason.

She referred to the written judgment.

The judgment is not final, but an appeal can be lodged with the Supreme Court.

The Federal Arbitration Court of the AfD had excluded Sayn-Wittgenstein from the party in 2019 because of behavior that was harmful to the party, after the Schleswig-Holstein State Arbitration Court had previously rejected the party committee.

He had been requested to be excluded from the party by the AfD federal executive committee.

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The main reason was that Sayn-Wittgenstein had advertised in 2014, as WELT discovered, for membership in the “Gedächtnisstätte” association, which is classified as a right-wing extremist by the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

The association was co-founded by Holocaust deniers, including Ursula Haverbeck, who was convicted on several occasions.

In the AfD, Sayn-Wittgenstein is one of the officially disbanded "wing" classified by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a right-wing extremist.

No longer a parliamentary group

With the exclusion from the party, Sayn-Wittgenstein also lost her position as head of the Schleswig-Holstein AfD state association in 2019.

Your application to be reinstated in this function has now been rejected by the Berlin district court, according to WELT information.

She was also not reinstated as a member of the state executive.

The court only decided that Sayn-Wittgenstein's exclusion from the party by the AfD Federal Arbitration Court was null and void.

She had sued against his decision, among other things, arguing that the party court had not held an oral hearing in her matter.

Whether this is the only reason for the declaration of invalidity by the regional court remains open until the reasons for the judgment are published.

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Despite the decision by the court, von Sayn-Wittgenstein is currently unable to exercise the rights of an AfD member again because the judgment is not yet final and the AfD federal executive board has the opportunity to appeal.

Nevertheless, the verdict in the Schleswig-Holstein AfD state association should cause great unrest, because von Sayn-Wittgenstein still has a lot of supporters there and quite a few members, including the state board, can introduce themselves as head of the state again.

Even before Sayn-Wittgenstein was excluded from the party in 2019, the AfD parliamentary group in the Kiel state parliament had excluded her because of the allegations.

The state constitutional court later confirmed this decision.

But that did not end the fuss about the AfD in Schleswig-Holstein.

Last year, the AfD also lost its parliamentary group status in the Kiel state parliament because a member of parliament announced that he was leaving the party because of the constant radicalization of the state association.

This meant that the three remaining AfD MPs could no longer form their own parliamentary group.