Bundestag: Who sits in the new AfD parliamentary group

The best-known AfD politicians remain in the Bundestag: Alice Weidel, Tino Chrupalla and Alexander Gauland are returning to parliament. But as the largest opposition party with a total of 152 seats, they will be joined by some newcomers: 92 AfD MPs are entering the next Bundestag. Not all of them are completely unknown. And among the MPs who are returning to parliament for the second time, there are also some who have already been in the public eye.

Some personnel issues were also recently discussed within the AfD: On Tuesday, the parliamentary group decided that the controversial MPs Maximilian Krah and Matthias Helferich would be admitted to the parliamentary group.

The AfD's Tiktok star, who was directly elected in Chemnitz with 44.2 percent of the vote, is surrounded by several scandals. Krah employed a man in his office in the European Parliament who is said to be a Chinese spy and is in custody. Krah is also said to have given a Russian spy access there. And he is suspected of having accepted money from pro-Russian networks: The Dresden Public Prosecutor's Office has been investigating Krah since last summer into possible payments from abroad.

With his statement in the Italian press that there were also "many peasants" in the Waffen-SS and that one cannot condemn all SS members across the board, Krah provoked Marine Le Pen , the head of the French Rassemblement National, so much that the AfD was kicked out of the joint parliamentary group in the European Parliament. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies several of Krah's statements as ethnic-nationalist, Islamophobic, xenophobic and anti-constitutional. Krah is a new member of the Bundestag.

The lawyer has already sat in the previous Bundestag. According to media research, he has connections to the Dortmund neo-Nazi scene and to former NPD politicians. Published text messages from him referred positively to the National Socialist organization "Lebensborn", which wanted to increase the birth rate of pure-bred Aryan children. Helferich, who was elected via the state list in North Rhine-Westphalia, described himself as the "friendly face of the NS".

This even caused waves within the AfD in 2021 and led to Helferich being banned from holding office and expelled from the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag. However, the federal leadership did not want to exclude the party - and in North Rhine-Westphalia, Helferich was also placed at the top of the list again before the 2025 election. Will he now be part of the new AfD parliamentary group? That is something that the party will have to clarify, said party leader Alice Weidel after the election on Sunday. In any case, four years ago she voted against expelling Helferich from the party.

With 37.3 percent of the vote, Seifert won the former Merkel constituency of Stralsund. This is the first time the 31-year-old AfD politician has entered the Bundestag. However, he has been politically active for some time. According to media reports, he has roots in the right-wing extremist scene in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. He reportedly took part in an NPD funeral march in 2014. Seifert confirmed to the "Nordkurier" that he had been a member of the NPD youth organization between 2012 and 2014.

He is now connected to the Junge Alternative (JA), the AfD's former youth organization, which the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies as definitely right-wing extremist. As a local politician, Seifert has often expressed historical revisionism: on Remembrance Day 2024, for example, he remembered only "with deep reverence the brave heroes of our people" and not all victims of war and tyranny. On Facebook, he wrote that patriots like him wanted to free themselves "from the anti-German perpetrator myth of the left-wing mainstream." Photos are also circulating in which he poses with weapons.

The AfD politician has been a member of the Bundestag since 2017; he is now returning to parliament via the Bavarian state list. Boehringer sits on the federal executive board of his party, but is also widely networked: he has often appeared in discussion formats on portals such as RT Deutsch, written for the right-wing extremist "Compact" magazine and other publications of the new right.

Previous publications, such as on the portal "Eigentümlich frei", show that Boehringer believes in the conspiracy myth of the "New World Order". There he spread conspiracy stories such as that "today's supranational elites are working towards a fully controlled world state with them as the highest caste". According to research by NDR and WDR, Boehringer sent emails in 2018 and in previous years in which he spoke of the "criminal = Koran-observant = misogynistic macho mob of the sons of the Surah". In the emails he also insulted several politicians and disparaged the Federal Constitutional Court with a photo montage of the "whore of justice (BVerfG)".

Hilse, who was directly elected in Bautzen with 46 percent of the vote, actually once belonged to the moderate part of the AfD. He has also been a member of the Bundestag since 2017. In the Corona years, however, he became increasingly radicalized: he appeared several times at events organized by the Querdenken movement, which regularly appears in the reports of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Hilse once came to the Bundestag wearing a Querdenken T-shirt and gave a speech in it; he was reprimanded as a result. In the course of the protests against the Corona measures, Hilse was arrested once in November 2020 and ultimately had to pay a fine of 20 daily rates for resisting law enforcement officers.

Hilse took part in events organized by the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), an association that denies the scientific consensus on climate change. Otherwise, however, he does not have much time for Europe. At an AfD party conference in 2021, Hilse campaigned for Germany to leave the EU: "Because the EU must die if Germany wants to live."

With 42 percent, Schieske won the Cottbus constituency directly, beating the previous SPD MP. The firefighter is new to parliament. But he also has a political history. Schieske wanted to become mayor of Cottbus in 2022. One of the ways he campaigned for this was with a direct mail campaign. It said: "Foreigners are becoming more and more numerous. They are becoming more and more cheeky. Many foreigners have no respect for us" - a complaint for incitement to hatred followed, but Schieske ultimately did not get the office.

According to a report in the "Tagesspiegel", Schieske has close contacts with the right-wing extremist association "Zukunft Heimat". This association is monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and has close ties to the Identitarian Movement (IB) and other right-wing extremist organizations. In April last year, the Brandenburg Ministry of the Interior confirmed that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution also classifies Schieske himself as a right-wing extremist.

Robert Teske is also new to the Bundestag. He achieved 42.1 percent in the constituency of Suhl – Schmalkalden-Meiningen – Hildburghausen – Sonneberg. Until now, he was the office manager of the Thuringian AfD leader Björn Höcke, who represents the extreme right within the AfD and promoted the ethnic-national orientation of the party, among other things through the "Flügel" group.

Even before his time with Höcke, Teske was involved in the right-wing extremist front of the AfD. As chairman of the Bremen JA, he demonstrated with the IB, Pegida leader Lutz Bachmann, the former chairman of the NPD youth organization JN Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Mario Müller, an Identitarian convicted of dangerous bodily harm who now works for the AfD member of the Bundestag Jan Wenzel Schmidt.

Teske defended the IB, with which there is an official incompatibility decision within the AfD: "The Identitarians are doing good things and are being wrongly monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution," he said in an interview with the association "Ein Prozent". The Office for the Protection of the Constitution considers the group to be right-wing extremist and anti-constitutional.