Nicolaus Fest: AfD arbitration court throws EU MPs out of the party

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Nicolaus Fest: AfD arbitration court throws him out of the party (here in June 2022)

Photo: Revierfoto / IMAGO

The AfD MEP Nicolaus Fest is thrown out of his party.

This is based on information available to SPIEGEL.

The “Welt” had previously reported.

Accordingly, the Berlin AfD's regional arbitration court excluded the politician from the party at the request of the federal executive committee, which Fest did not want to accept.

According to the report, the party executive committee led by Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla justified the application with unpaid contributions that elected officials in the AfD have to pay according to the statutes, similar to those in other parties.

Internal power struggle

The newspaper had previously reported on an email from Fest to the AfD federal office from January 2023.

In it, he justified the suspended payments with a leak from an internal chat group of the AfD delegation in the European Parliament.

On the day of the death of the President of the European Parliament David Sassoli in January 2022, Fest wrote about him in the group chat: “This dirty pig is finally gone.” The ARD capital studio reported on this at the time.

Fest wrote in the email that a high-ranking AfD official - according to "Welt", Fest wrote from Maximilian Krah - claimed in July 2022 that AfD parliamentary group leader Alice Weidel had pierced the screenshot.

Fest said he couldn't finance a party whose speaker would have to assume "that its speaker is involved in a possible criminal intrigue against me."

A spokesman for Alice Weidel told the "Welt" at the time: "The baseless speculations mentioned in Mr. Fest's letter are a transparent diversionary tactic and have no basis."

According to the newspaper's report, Fest worked as a journalist for "Bild am Sonntag" until 2014.

He then sat for the AfD in the European Parliament since 2019.

Since February 2022 he was head of the AfD MPs in the right-wing national parliamentary group Identity and Democracy (ID) until he resigned just over a year later.

This was preceded by a dispute in the AfD group about Fest's allegations against his parliamentary group and party colleague Maximilian Krah.

It was about the accusation that Krah was said to have manipulated the awarding of a PR contract for the parliamentary group.

The AfD regional arbitration court's ruling is not legally binding, and Fest wants to take action against it.

He told the "Welt": "The sole purpose of the proceedings is to wipe out an intrigue against me by the two federal speakers and Mr. Krahs," said the MEP.

"However, formally, the court focused essentially on the elected representatives' fees and did not want to see the obvious abuse of the party exclusion process." Fest was not put up again for the AfD's list for the European elections this year.

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