From time to time we are confronted with the accusation of being close to the AfD. We would therefore like to comment on this once again and set the record straight.
In the run-up to the federal election, in April 2017 we published eight electoral test questions, signed by more than 50 Jewish women and men, whose purpose was to confront the parties with positions that matter to us. In order to give our concerns a wider hearing, an open supporter list was set up after publication, in which people could enter their name and their function. Among more than 400 supporters, four listed the addition AfD – less than one per cent.
The AfD was then, as it is now, in no way our partner; from the perspective of the time, however, we would have considered it undemocratic to delete by hand the representatives of a party that was entering the Bundestag. In the spring of 2017 the AfD was already plainly problematic and populist, but not yet as radicalised, and thus as uniformly unacceptable, as it is today. A few months ago we then decided to remove all function titles from the supporter list of the electoral test questions, in order to counter possible political misuse of those titles.
The AfD, and we have made this clear time and again, is not and never was a political partner for us.
Our rejection of the AfD goes further still: we were the first Jewish organisation to speak out against the newly founded association “Juden in der AfD” (JAfD), and shortly afterwards also a supporter of the major joint appeal by the Zentralrat together with more than 40 Jewish organisations.
We stand for positions that strengthen the free democratic basic order and the rule of law on the foundation of values. In our positions we therefore do not speak in nationalist terms of a “German Leitkultur”, but of a “free and democratic culture of society”, so that participation in society is measured neither by religion, skin colour nor passport, but by the canon of values set out in the Basic Law.
For us as Jewish Germans it is unacceptable when antisemitism is tolerated within a party – whether historically revisionist, relativising or anti-Zionist, or in the form of long-standing stereotypes and images of the enemy.
