Erfurt/Weimar (dpa/th) – The AfD parliamentary group is withdrawing its constitutional complaint regarding appointments to the body responsible for monitoring the protection of the constitution in the state parliament. Group leader Björn Höcke said on Friday in Erfurt. He justified this with an amendment to the Constitutional Protection Act passed by the state parliament in December.
The lawsuit filed by the AfD faction against the state parliament was supposed to be heard in Weimar next Wednesday (January 11), the constitutional court had recently announced. The background to this is that the AfD faction saw its rights violated because of the non-election of its candidates for the so-called Parliamentary Control Commission.
The application to the constitutional court is based on the legal situation in force until December 2022, according to which the AfD group should have been taken into account in the parliamentary control commission, the group said. There is now a legal basis for “further exclusion from the control of the domestic secret service,” Höcke said. He spoke of the “exclusion of about a quarter of the votes in Thuringia”.
Because of the disputes surrounding the AfD candidates, the state parliament commission for the protection of the constitution was not fully occupied for a long time. In Thuringia, the AfD is being monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution because of right-wing extremist tendencies.
With the rule change made by the state parliament based on the example of North Rhine-Westphalia, a blockade of the commission should be prevented in the future. So far, the five members of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution have been filled according to the strength of the parliamentary groups in the state parliament; in future, the opposition should be appropriately represented alongside the governing coalition. This means that members of parliament from individual parliamentary groups no longer have to be members of the control committee.
