Brandenburg’s AfD parliamentary group leader Hans-Christoph Berndt has two faces. Anyone who speaks to him initially encounters a calm, friendly man. Anyone who hears him on stage experiences a man with sharp words who likes to dress up right-wing ideas in speeches peppered with quotes.
The laboratory doctor is one of six MPs that the state’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies as right-wing extremists. During the election campaign, Berndt spoke of “uncontrolled mass migration policy”. He wants to abolish the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which he described as “neo-Stasi”, and public broadcasting in its current form. Berndt was born in Bernau in 1956 and is married.
Group leader and right-wing networker
Berndt has been a member of the state parliament since 2019. The following year he took over the parliamentary group chairmanship from Andreas Kalbitz. Berndt is well connected. In its latest report, the Brandenburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution writes that he prefers to be close to right-wing extremist actors. In 2015, Berndt founded the Zukunft Heimat association, which the Office for the Protection of the Constitution considers to be right-wing extremist. In 2016, the Charité supervisory board distanced itself from “xenophobic statements” made by Berndt, then a faculty staff council member.
In his speeches in the state parliament, he does not hold back on attacks against the other parties. He believes that the strategy of excluding the AfD has failed. “If we become the strongest force and if Dietmar Woidke (SPD) is gone, as he has announced, then a movement will be set in motion that can no longer be stopped,” he said at the beginning of September. According to initial projections, this is not the case, so the SPD can expect to come first.
Election campaign with drastic language
The leading candidate does not just want an electoral victory in order to change parts of Brandenburg. Berndt also sees the AfD as a lever for an end to the traffic light government at the federal level. “We also have the power to destroy the traffic light with these blows,” he said at a campaign event in Forst.
The 67-year-old often focuses on the topic of migration. “Germany is the country of the Germans, Germany should remain the country of the Germans,” he said in Forst. “Germany is the heritage of our youth – and they should not have to submit to any Bedouins.” Bedouins are nomads of the Arabian Peninsula.
Berndt was, in his own words, once a “leftist”
In his own words, he was not always on the right: “I am also an old leftist who has moved away over time.” During the round of top candidates on RBB television, Berndt was asked what charity meant to him as a Catholic. He stuck to his line: “Looking after the members of your own people.”
© dpa-infocom, dpa:240922-930-240114/1
This is a message directly from the dpa news channel.
