Author: Vojtěch Berger, HlidaciPes.org
In Germany they are being monitored by the secret service for extremism, in Prague they are walking freely through Parliament. Tomio Okamura’s Czech SPD party has renewed its contacts with youth organisation of the Alternative for Germany party from Saxony and invited them to Prague. The SPD does not seem to be disturbed by the fact that German counter-intelligence is monitoring the youth of the AfD for extremism and that the Saxon branch of the Junge Alternative is one of the most radical.
Last year, the SPD and the AfD youth met on the periphery – in the city of Ústí nad Labem near the Czech-German border, where the Saxon Junge Alternative rented a hall for its weekend meeting. This year, Tomio Okamura has personally guided the same faces through the Czech lower house. Their stay in Prague included a seminar, a pub or a visit to the National Museum.
The SPD has always ignored extremism within the AfD on the grounds that it is inconclusive. But the Saxon branch of the Junge Alternative is a good example of why the German counter-intelligence has labelled AfD youths nationwide and specifically also in several German states as “extremist”.
In November 2023, young AfD sympathisers went on a hiking trip around the Saxon city of Bautzen. Along the way, they visited several memorials to war victims. The participants carried Junge Alternative banners and there were also conversations along the way about establishing ghettos for migrants and Jews. This was revealed by two RTL journalists who attended the event undercover.
What’s behind the democratic facade
“First, I would just intern them. They have a duty to work. They could set up workshops, for example. Of course, they have to perform in order to get food and a roof over their heads,” the journalists quote one of the participants as saying that the conditions for the internees would be so unbearable that they would eventually leave Germany themselves.
Or another “musings” uttered along the way: “It requires a certain willingness to violence in the German nation. (…) As a state, I would look for volunteers who are prepared to shoot even women and children in an emergency.”
The AfD has distanced itself from these statements, and the Junge Alternative sees them as a provocation by secret service agents. But it is precisely the long-standing similar excesses behind the party’s “democratic façade” that have led to the counter-intelligence service monitoring the party and its youth for many years.
As can be seen in the photographs from last year’s event, which are still available on social media, some of the participants in that march are identical to the ones Tomio Okamura led through the Czech lower house this September.
In addition to the Saxon branch of the AfD, the Czech SPD also maintains contacts with the Bavarian branch, and the two parties were originally planning to cooperate in a large far-right group in the European Parliament. But the SPD did not perform well in this year’s European elections and the AfD’s reputation was weakened by pre-election scandals about Russian and Chinese influence linked to some of the party’s politicians.
This included Petr Bystroň, an AfD politician with Czech roots who was elected MEP in June and had previously worked with the Czech SPD during the campaign.
After the elections, Okamura’s only MEP, Ivan David, ended up in the same faction as the AfD, but their newly established Europe of Sovereign Nations was only a reaction to the formation of the Patriots for Europe fraction of the Hungarian Fidesz, the Austrian Freedom Party and the Czech party ANO. It was with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party that the Okamura party originally wanted to cooperate.
SPD boasts of “imported surgeons”
However, the recent AfD youth meeting in Prague indicated that if things do not work out with Orbán, the SPD must look elsewhere. Thus, youth representatives from the Hungarian far-right party Mi Hazánk (Our Country) came to Prague too. The SPD has signed a memorandum of cooperation with them in 2023.
The head of Mi Hazánk, László Toroczkai, caused a stir across Europe in January 2024 with his remarks that if Ukraine falls in the war with Russia, the Hungarians will take Transcarpathia for themselves.
In addition to the Germans and Hungarians, the SPD also welcomed representatives of similarly minded parties from Poland and Switzerland to Prague during the aforementioned meeting in September.
Photos publicly available on social media show that the Okamura party showed off to the foreign delegation, for example, the latest SPD campaign visuals, including a billboard with a black-skinned man holding a bloody knife and the phrase “imported surgeons”. The Czech police earlier began investigating this controversial campaign.
“It was a good and motivating encounter. We agreed: In the coming weeks, months and years, we want to deepen and expand our cooperation,” Lennard Scharpe, a member of the Saxon Junge Alternative leadership, summed up the trip to Prague on Facebook.
Despite all the controversy, neither the visit itself nor the long-term contacts of one of the Czech parliamentary parties with a group considered extremist in Germany attracted any public, political or media attention in the Czech Republic.
