A radical provocateur
At 52, this former sports and history teacher, born in North Rhine-Westphalia, has become in just a few years one of the most radical voices of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD). The son of a teacher at a school for the blind and a nurse, he was marked from an early age by family stories about East Prussia, where his family came from and where his grandparents were expelled by the Red Army. A legacy that he put at the service of his political career. His recurring provocations did not succeed in stopping the voters of Thuringia, a state in central Germany, who placed his political party far ahead in the regional elections of 1Ahem September, with almost 33% of the vote. AfD, considered out of reach of the other parties, has little chance of forming a coalition.
Complacent with Nazism
It was thanks to his proximity to neo-Nazi circles that Björn Höcke emerged on the German political scene, when he was elected to the Thuringian parliament in 2014. From very early on, the man made uninhibited comments about the legacy of Nazism, tinged with revisionism. In a speech in Dresden in January 2017, he called the Berlin Holocaust Memorial a “monument to shame” and calls on Germany to act “a 180-degree turn in his memory policy.” “The big problem is that Hitler is presented as absolutely evil, he said again in an interview with Wall Street Journal in 2017. But, of course, we know that there is no black and white in history. » Until now, the courts have considered that his multiple borrowings from the lexicon of National Socialism were conscious and assumed, in particular when he was convicted in May and July for using the SA (Nazi paramilitary organisation) motto “All for Germany”. [« tout pour l’Allemagne »].
Absent and shameful
Protected by his notoriety, the figure is not unanimous within the AfD, whose leaders aspire to govern one day. His shameful outbursts are annoying, which partly explains why he never dared to stand as a candidate for the federal leadership of the party. In the press, his relatives point out his absence from the Thuringian parliament, which, however, pays him a compensation of 13,000 euros as leader of the group, according to the newspaper. Spiegel. His immunity as a member of parliament was lifted nine times so that he could be investigated without his career being hampered. His megalomania is also annoying. Convinced of having a national destiny, Björn Höcke invokes in his appearances the myth of the Kyffhäuser, a Germanic legend according to which the 12th century emperormy century Frederick Barbarossa will one day awaken to lead the empire to new greatness.
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