It is her last big appearance in the Bundestag, maybe the last as a politician at all.
Frauke Petry invited to a conference room to present her book.
It is called “Requiem for the AfD”, and Petry, once the celebrated leader of the party, settles accounts with her.
The AfD is today a "chaotic protest party", it is broken and "as far removed as ever from the ability to govern".
All of this is irreversible.
Markus Wehner
Political correspondent in Berlin.
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In Petry's biography, too, there are some things that can no longer be reversed.
Shortly after the 2017 federal election, she had left the AfD, previously disempowered by the radical “wing”;
their attempt to achieve success with a new party called "The Blue" failed miserably.
Petry is smarter than most AfD politicians, her appearance is at the same time full of self-righteousness.
It is therefore not surprising that in the years up to 2016, when it was at the top, it portrayed the AfD as a party that had a “substantive claim”.
With her defeat at the Cologne party congress in 2017, he was lost.
Petry regrets defense of "völkisch"
Petry's book is politically explosive, especially due to the allegations against party leader Jörg Meuthen and Alice Weidel, the parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag: They used money from donors for their own purposes. For example, Meuthen had "illegally accepted funds" from Schweitzer Goal AG, which, according to Petrys, should be used for appearances on social media. You have "electronic evidence" for this claim. Her evidence, which she does not include in her book, would be available to the President of the Bundestag, who would conduct further investigations. Meuthen had claimed that Petry was untruthful on the matter. You have therefore given him until Monday at 12 noon to withdraw it. If he doesn't, “I'll sue him”. The fight that Petry was waging is still going on.
By accepting illegal donations, politicians like Meuthen and Weidel made themselves susceptible to blackmail, which is why they switched to the right-wing extremist "wing" led by Björn Höcke.
At the time, Petry had unsuccessfully initiated an exclusionary procedure against Höcke.
She self-critically admits that she did not make her rejection of Höcke public early enough.
The fact that she defended the term “völkisch” in an interview was wrong, “I got lost in terms of content”.
Settlement also with the media
However, her complaint about how unfairly she was treated by the media takes more space. Petry names individual journalists whom she accuses of “unclean work”. She has not entrusted her book to an established publisher. Her husband Marcus Pretzell, himself a former AfD politician, has founded a publishing house for this purpose, the sole purpose of which is to publish the book, as Petry himself puts it. "I wanted to tell my personal story, not censor myself and not be censored."
The AfD will die a slow death, maybe disappear from the Bundestag in 2025, Petry predicts. Meuthen only took his moderate course to prevent the protection of the Constitution from observing the entire party, but she will come anyway. Many would then leave the AfD, some after the federal election in order to secure a mandate beforehand. For many it is then unclear how things will go on with their lives. And she herself does not yet know where to find herself.