The former Frankfurt CDU member of the Bundestag Erika Steinbach wants to join the AfD.

She announced this via Twitter on Friday evening.

This is only surprising in that the 78-year-old politician did not actually want to join a new party after she left the CDU in 2017 as a result of her criticism of Angela Merkel's refugee policy.

The fact that Steinbach sympathizes with the AfD, on the other hand, is nothing new: she is chairwoman of the Desiderius Erasmus Foundation, which is close to the AfD, and also appeared at AfD events, such as last year for the election and presentation of the party's Bundestag candidates in Frankfurt.

Martin Benninghoff

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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According to her post, the "incomprehensible, unfair departure of Jörg Meuthen" made her rethink. The former federal chairman of the AfD announced his departure last week and has not been sparing in criticizing the party for a long time, which has been moving further and further to the right since it was founded in Oberursel in 2013. Steinbach does not want to accept that: The AfD has a "deeply bourgeois" program and is a "glimmer of hope in a rather darkened time," she wrote on Friday. Meuthen's behavior was a "slap in the face".

Steinbach, who was born in wartime in West Prussia in what is now Poland, was a city councilor for the CDU in the Frankfurt Römer from 1977 to 1990 and a member of the Bundestag in the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in Berlin after 1990 until she left.

She won the Frankfurt constituency II several times. She also gained nationwide fame through her appearance as President of the Association of Expellees.

Within the CDU, Steinbach had long been considered a comparatively right-wing conservative, and during Merkel's tenure she increasingly alienated the liberal course of the then Chancellor and her party.

Steinbach became even more active on Twitter, where he shared the AfD's anti-Islamic and anti-refugee positions.

Her announced entry into the party is therefore the logical consequence of a trend that has been observed for a long time.