Erfurt (dpa/th) – The mayoral candidate Tommy Frenck, who is led by the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a right-wing extremist, clearly lost the vote in Kloster Veßra (Hildburghausen district). Frenck received 29.1 percent of the votes cast on Sunday, according to the State Office for Statistics. His opponent and incumbent, Wolfgang Möller, achieved 70.9 percent of the votes. Voter turnout in the town was 83.4 percent.
Frenck’s candidacy had provided a topic of conversation in advance. The Thuringian State Secretary for the Interior, Katharina Schenk, had said that if Frenck were to win the election, the local election law would prohibit him from taking office because he was not acting on the basis of the basic democratic order.
According to the Thuringian constitutional protection report, Frenck has been running the “Goldener Löwe” in Kloster Veßra for years. This attracts right-wing extremists from Germany and all over Europe. In 2017, he was also a co-organizer of Germany’s largest right-wing music festival to date in Themar, southern Thuringia, with 6,000 visitors.
