A journalist catches up with the “nicest people” in the far-right, anti-immigrant German AfD party – people with an immigrant background themselves.
Refugees Welcome The English phrase became widespread after the large influx of refugees in 2015–2016.
Immigrant background The term “Migrationshintergrund” denotes someone who has at least one parent who did not acquire German citizenship at birth, irrespective of where they themselves were born and raised.
South Hessian dialect Laudi’s local accent is retained in the original. In South Hessian, word endings tend to be dropped.
Potsdam... This chillingly evokes the 1942 Wannsee Conference where Nazi officials gathered in a Berlin villa to plan the extermination of Europe’s Jews.
Brainstorm “Gebrainstormt” in the original.Völkisch ideology denotes a 19th-century German ethnonationalist movement viewed as a forerunner of Nazism.
... Immigration “Volkstod durch Zuwanderung”, a pseudoscientific idea akin to the “Great Replacement” theory.If everything is given... The original mocks Schmiedel’s broken German.
Willkommenskultur German for ‘welcoming culture’, voted Austria’s ‘Word of the Year’ in 2015.Devoted Afghan literally an Afghan woman at heart.
Uneasy “Bauchschmerzen” – stomach pain
Passport recipients “Passbeschenkte” – AfD jargon which literally means ‘those given passports as presents’.
Bird shit “Vogelschiss” referring to Gauland’s 2018 remarks as AfD’s co-leader that “Hitler and the Nazis are just bird poo in 1,000 years of successful German history”, relativising the horrors of Nazism.
Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.
Völkisch logorrhoea From Ancient Greek λόγος (‘word’) and ῥέω (‘to flow’), logorrhoea refers to rapid, uncontrollable babbling; in this case, it describes the AfD’s excessive ethnonationalist ranting.
Markus Lanz A talk show host best known for his work on ZDF, one of Germany’s major public broadcasters.
Tino Chrupalla A leading figure in the AfD.
Alice Weidel Co-chairwoman of the AfD.
Member of the SPD Germany’s main centre-left party.
Xenophobic leadership “Die fremdenfeindliche Regierungssau rauslässt” – “to let the foreigner-hating pig out”.Orfeo Laudi shakes his head. “The overwhelming majority of our members are sympathetic to foreign fellow citizens,” he says, in a broad South Hessian dialect. “I’ve always said, if the AfD became as far-right extremist as the media describe it, I’d leave immediately.” A short pause: “But that won’t happen.”
Laudi, it seems, understands not just the party’s present, but also its future – a future that deeply concerns many Germans. The country recently witnessed its largest-ever demonstrations, when it emerged that AfD members had met in a villa in Potsdam to brainstorm plans to deport millions. Völkisch slogans have made the party’s rightward shift unmistakable. At one point, proposals were floated to bar asylum seekers from attending folk festivals; at another, the German national football team was derided as a “thoroughly multiculturalised mercenary force” and warnings were issued about the “uncontrolled spread of culturally alien species”.
But Orfeo Laudi, speaking at a meeting in the picturesque town of Weinheim in Baden-Württemberg offers reassurance: the AfD is harmless, committed to a functioning community. Any immigrant who genuinely tries to learn German and avoids misogynistic or antisemitic remarks should face no problems. In this half-timbered idyll, the gold standard of successful integration appears to be joining the AfD.
The association that Laudi belongs to is called ‘Mit Migrationshintergrund für Deutschland’ (literally, ‘Those with an Immigrant Background for Germany’; more roughly, ‘Immigrants for Germany’). His father is Italian. The association says it brings together around 170 people with a migrant history in active support of the AfD and its goals – including mass deportations. At first glance, this may seem contradictory. But for some second- and third-generation migrants, there’s been a growing belief that today’s newcomers are handed things far too easily, while their own parents from Anatolia or southern Italy had to toil around the clock. They fear the country’s rising xenophobia could one day be turned against them too.
Some now seek refuge in the AfD – a party whose members of parliament openly fantasise about ethnic purity, a society built on ancestry, and the death of the native population through immigration. It inevitably conjures up the memory of the Association of National German Jews who tried to appease the Nazis during the Third Reich to save themselves – a plan that, tragically, went terribly awry.
“I immediately realised the AfD is my safe space,” says Catherine Schmiedel, one member of the association. Born in Nigeria, she arrived in Germany in 2013 and says she immediately joined a language course that was repeatedly disrupted by young Muslim men – leaving her permanently hostile to Arab immigrants, particularly when the same thing happened again six years later. Unlike her, the men had their course fees paid, reinforcing Schmiedel’s belief, as someone who still only speaks limited German, that the state is far too lax: “If everything is given you for free, then you no value it.”
2015 – the year of the ‘Willkommenskultur’ or, depending on one’s political stripe, ‘mass immigration’ – was a game changer. The only party which offered some resistance, she says, is the AfD, which Schmiedel joined in 2021. Since then, she has been insulted online as a “Black Nazi” or a “stupid monkey”. Some particularly confused trolls have simply left a banana under her posts.
Zakia Rappenberg, too, is accustomed to aghast looks when she mentions her AfD membership. She came to Germany with her family from Afghanistan in the 1980s – fleeing the Soviet invasion. For her, it wasn’t immigration that drove her into the AfD’s arms, but another hot-button issue: COVID-19. “I can’t forget it. It destroyed me emotionally,” says Rappenberg. After refusing the vaccine, she felt treated like a second-class citizen. “A terrible time.”Even then, the only party that took her concerns seriously was the AfD. She later found support there when Afghan refugees critcised her for wearing a short skirt. Anyone who opposes women’s emancipation, she adds, is politely told to leave.
In Rappenberg’s family, they no longer talk about politics. With her brother – who lives in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin and votes for the Left Party – she has reached an unspoken truce at their mother’s request. The arrangement keeps family gatherings over Afghan food amicable. “You don’t shake off your culture of origin; Germany is my second home,” says Rappenberg
A safe space where foreigners find sympathetic people who champion pluralism and cosmopolitanism: for these AfD members, the party feels like a paradise for those from different cultural backgrounds. But these virtues otherwise mean little in the AfD cosmos. Let’s be honest, if the party’s long-cherished vision of ‘remigration’ of millions who don’t sufficiently assimilate is realised, Rappenberg, the devoted Afghan, Schmiedel, the Black woman, and Laudi, the Italian with a Hessian twang, would almost certainly be affected.
They hardly meet the lineage rules demanded by strict AfD thinkers. Laudi, moreover, still does not hold a German passport, despite being born in the country to a German mother. At the time of his birth 60 years ago, German law classified him as Italian. Acquiring citizenship as a so-called ‘passport German’ was just too much paperwork. He refused to pay the €100 fee.
The question for the dear members of Immigrants for Germany remains: does no one get uneasy when the AfD works hard to promote societal division, when many members and voters dream of a Germany where people like you no longer have a place? Perhaps this isn’t a question for ordinary association members, but for the chairman and founder, who sits modestly at the table, contributing little more than facial expressions to the conversation so far. Enter Athanasios Robert Lambrou.
Lambrou has remained, despite the trivialisation of the Holocaust, praise for SS men, and blanket vilification of migrants as knife-wielders, headscarf girls, or good-for-nothings
Lambrou, 57, is the son of a Greek father and a German mother. In the 1980s, he voted for the Greens and in the 1990s he was a member of the SPD. In 2013, he co-founded the AfD, driven by concern about the cost to Germany of saving the euro. He belonged to the party’s economic-liberal wing, many of whom have departed the AfD as it has radicalised. Lambrou has remained, despite the trivialisation of the Holocaust, praise for SS men, and blanket vilification of migrants as knife-wielders, headscarf girls, or good-for-nothings which forced figures such as Bernd Lucke, Frauke Petry, and, most recently, Jörg Meuthen to leave.
“I understand anyone looking for a better life in Germany,” Lambrou says. “But communities function best when they are homogeneous. I don’t mean ethnically, but culturally. I don’t want to argue with someone who is antisemitic.” It was this rhetorically measured tone that helped Lambrou, as co-chairman, push the Hessian AfD to over 18 per cent in the last state election – a modest result by East German standards, but a record in the old West.
Across the country, Lambrou acts as a bourgeois fig leaf. It is unclear whether he recognises this, whether he truly is bourgeois, or whether, thanks to his impeccable manners, he is in fact more dangerous than the thugs of the East German state branches. Unlike them, Lambrou never raises his voice – not even on talk shows where Markus Lanz and the other guests press him hard. Whereas zealots such as Tino Chrupalla or Alice Weidel portray themselves in panel discussions as victims of cancel culture, Lambrou instead explains why “uncontrolled mass immigration” brings huge problems in Germany – and why any immigrant who learns German and respects women and Jews is welcome. Yet, and this can only be intentional, Lambrou ignores a few things: that many in the AfD want to ban women from working, buy into a Jewish world conspiracy, and want to downgrade ‘passport recipients’ to second-class citizens for lack of Germanic ancestry.
When Robert Lambrou is faced with such on-the-record statements from his party colleagues, he resorts to the AfD’s standard playbook. The quotes, he claims, are taken out of context by hostile media, later withdrawn (such as Alexander Gauland’s description of National Socialism as “bird shit”) or products of the heat of the moment. “Please assume that we all have genuine concerns about Germany,” says Lambrou. If someone in his party indulges in particularly populist bluster, he says he calls them, urging them to be more precise: “You can quickly tell them that it’s not meant that way.”
Lambrou is a master of smokescreens, and with Immigrants for Germany he has created a powerful tool. This became evident last year, during proceedings at the Higher Administrative Court in Münster, which was examining whether the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution could classify the entire AfD as a suspected right-wing extremist organisation. As living proof that it was not pursuing a völkisch agenda, the party sent Lambrou, Catherine Schmiedel, and an association member of Iranian origin to the witness stand. One of the lawyers for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution described the trio’s memorable performance as a “no longer plausible trivialisation”.
Lambrou sees it more as a case of every plain-spoken AfD remark being inflated into a scandal: “The window of what can be said has shrunk dramatically.” Positions that CDU politicians could voice without controversy in the 1990s, he claims, today attract the attention of the public prosecutor. The most recent evidence of this, he and many AfD members say, is a report by the domestic security services confirming the federal AfD is a right-wing extremist party.
Right-wing populist media such as Cicero, Nius, and Tichys Einblick dismiss the report – more than 1,000 pages long – as a colossal hoax. Some sections appear to support that view. One passage involves Lambrou: the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution quotes him saying that “migrants in Germany should integrate – yes, assimilate – and not build parallel societies”. According to the Office’s assessment, the word “assimilate” is the problem here, as an “indication of an ethnic lineage-based concept of the people”.
Such overwrought interpretations make it easy for the AfD to dismiss the report outright as nonsense, even though it contains plenty of quotes from other party figures that could have come from Mein Kampf. Behind closed doors, some in the party admit that around 20 per cent of the report poses a real problem – which would still amount to 200 pages of völkisch logorrhoea.
Lambrou is determined to challenge the “defamatory” references in the report, and counts his migrant party colleagues firmly in his corner. Orfeo Laudi and Zakia Rappenberg have only read excerpts, yet they are equally certain that the report’s sole purpose is to make the AfD look bad.
So, what’s left after a day with the nicest people in the AfD? Because that’s exactly what they are: Signore Laudi, the Greek-born career bureaucrat Lambrou, and the secular Muslim Rappenberg.
Even if tempting, one cannot say that migrants who have legitimate fears of racism are simply seeking safety in the AfD. For Orfeo Laudi, Catherine Schmiedel, and Zakia Rappenberg, the risk is too high that one day they may wake up to a harsh reality – that when the party no longer needs them, it unleashes its xenophobic leadership and treats people the way its great role model Donald Trump does in the US: terrorising dissenters, arresting them on the streets, and deporting people without legal grounds.
But what can AfD veteran Lambrou actually do? Can he shield his multicultural friends from the sleazy Björn Höcke, who unquestionably sets the tone in the AfD? At times, it almost sounds as if Lambrou himself fears the day his party might take power. “I’m not in politics to make the AfD strong,” he insists; for him, the rule is: “First the country, then the party, then the individual.” Perhaps it would be wiser to put himself first.
