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The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is seeking to improve its manners as part of an attempt to broaden its appeal and get closer to its goal of taking power.
Members of parliament from the party, which finished second in February’s national elections, will be asked at a closed-doors gathering this weekend to approve a new code of conduct.
The text, drawn up by AfD’s chief whip Stephan Brandner, says MPs should adopt a “united and moderate stance” in the Bundestag in order to improve the credibility of a group that has become notorious for its rowdy behaviour.
It also sets out rules on conflicts of interest and bribery after a string of scandals in which party MPs have been accused of taking Russian and Chinese money.
The number of reprimands issued in the Bundestag reached its highest postwar level during the last parliament. Two-thirds of these “calls to order” were levied against the AfD, with MPs drawing censure for using terms such as “child murderer”, “liar” and “hypocrite” against political opponents.
The party is gunning for a first-place finish at the next national elections in the EU’s most populous nation, scheduled for 2029.
A senior AfD official told the Financial Times the guidelines were aimed at winning over new voters and building on the party’s record result of 21 per cent earlier this year.
The official added that it also wanted to erode opposition within mainstream parties — particularly the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) — to working with the AfD.
All major parties have ruled out forming a coalition with the far-right group, whose members of parliament include a man who once described himself as the “friendly face” of Nazism and another who has sought to downplay the crimes of Adolf Hitler’s SS.
Brandner, the chief whip who proposed the new etiquette, himself received several reprimands this year alone. They included one for heckling Friedrich Merz — who at that time was chancellor-in-waiting — with the term “Pinocchio” and another for describing the Social Democrats as a “Nazi troop”.
But some influential voices within the CDU have grown critical of the “firewall” around the party, arguing that it has failed to stem the party’s rise.
The AfD, which was founded in 2013 and first entered the Bundestag in 2017, has grown increasingly radical in recent years and does not have a reputation for parliamentary courtesy.
The president of the last Bundestag — a role akin to being speaker in the US House of Representatives or speaker of the UK’s House of Commons — warned in November that the atmosphere in the German legislative body had “noticeably changed for the worse”.
Without naming any parties, Bärbel Bas, a member of the Social Democrats, said some MPs were collecting reprimands “like trophies”.
“The language has become harsher — above all, more discriminatory,” she said.
Her deputy from the far-left Die Linke, Petra Pau, explicitly called out the AfD, accusing the party of having no interest in debate. “The goal is to make democracy look ridiculous,” she said.
The AfD was formally declared to be right-wing extremist by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency earlier this year, which said that it was inciting hatred against Muslims and migrants.
The classification could pave the way for the constitutional court to ban the party if it is asked to do so by the government or the parliament. But Merz, who became chancellor in May, has voiced scepticism about the merits of doing so.
