F.A.Z. Podcast für Deutschland · Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Der erste AfD-Ministerpräsident? Ulrich Siegmund im Interview

·41 min·3 clips

Ulrich Siegmund could become Germany's first AfD minister-president if his party wins 40% in Saxony-Anhalt's election.

1. FAZ Podcast für Deutschland host Simon Strauß interviews Ulrich Siegmund, AfD Spitzenkandidat for Sachsen-Anhalt, approximately five months before the September 6 state election. 2. Siegmund, 35 years old, trained as a Groß- und Außenhandelskaufmann, runs a TikTok account with over 600,000 followers and has led the AfD Landtag Fraktion in Sachsen-Anhalt since 2022. 3. The episode's core question is whether Siegmund, whose party polls at 40 percent against 26 percent for the CDU, could become Germany's first AfD Ministerpräsident. 4. Siegmund left the Catholic Church in 2017, citing what he calls the church's political interference and departure from traditional values, but says he would still want a church burial. 5. He advocates questioning Staatsleistungen — state payments to churches — and frames it as a question of whether taxpayers should fund politically active institutions rather than as hostility to faith. 6. On public broadcasting, Siegmund proposes cancelling the Rundfunkstaatsverträge, accepting the two-year notice period, and replacing the current system with a 'Grundfunk' of factual regional reporting supplemented by voluntary subscription add-ons. 7. Siegmund defends the AfD's proposal to replace the Schulpflicht with a 'Bildungspflicht,' framing it as permitting homeschooling in exceptional cases such as severe bullying, while insisting the goal is to restore order and academic standards in schools. 8. He backs restoring Russian-language teaching in Sachsen-Anhalt schools, arguing that geopolitical tensions should not lead to the permanent removal of Russian-language and cultural education. 9. Siegmund draws a comparison between East German voters' experience of Stasi surveillance and the current Verfassungsschutz monitoring of the AfD, saying voters tell him at events that 'das hatten wir schon mal.' 10. When asked whether he would describe present-day Germany as a dictatorship or DDR 2.0, he distances himself from the label but cites a 'Verbotsdiskussion' against the AfD as an antidemocratic tendency. 11. He states that his definition of German citizenship follows AfD programmatic lines: citizenship equals passport, nothing more. 12. On remigration, Siegmund focuses on removing financial incentives for irregular migration and on repatriating German-trained professionals who have emigrated, citing a figure of over 200,000 Germans leaving Germany annually. 13. He notes that 83 percent of new healthcare workers in Sachsen-Anhalt come from third countries, describing this as an indictment of the current state government's workforce planning rather than an argument for continued third-country recruitment. 14. When the host revisits Siegmund's earlier public refusal to rank the Holocaust as the worst crime in history, Siegmund confirms he would give the same answer, framing it as a principled unwillingness to rank human suffering. 15. Pressed on whether the Holocaust should anchor his moral framework as Ministerpräsident, Siegmund avoids the term 'Staatsräson' and instead speaks of learning from history broadly and looking forward. 16. Host Simon Strauß confronts Siegmund with ZDF reporting that his father earns 5,500 euros monthly in the Bundestag office of AfD MP Thomas Korell; Siegmund confirms the figure is correct. 17. Siegmund characterises seven to eight weeks of press coverage of the nepotism allegations as a 'falsche Prioritätensetzung' and says no law was broken. 18. The interview is probing and occasionally combative, with Strauß repeatedly presenting contradictions between Siegmund's stated positions and his party's programme; Siegmund's responses are fluent but frequently deflective. 19. FAZ correspondent Reinhard Bingner assesses Siegmund in a brief post-interview segment as not the programmatic architect of the AfD Sachsen-Anhalt campaign but as 'der beste Verkäufer dieser Politik.' 20. Listeners interested in German far-right politics, the east German political landscape, or the mechanics of AfD electoral strategy will find this episode substantive; those seeking a neutral policy comparison across parties will not find one here.

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