Legal dispute with AfD Thuringia – Regional Court again rules in favor of WELT

The AfD Thuringia must grant journalists from several media outlets, including WELT, access to the election event on the evening of the state election on September 1 to the same extent as other media representatives. This was decided by the Erfurt Regional Court after an oral hearing on Saturday afternoon.

The Thuringian AfD had previously refused accreditation to reporters from WELT Print/Digital, “Spiegel”, “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, “Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland”, “taz” and “Bild”, which is also published by Axel Springer. In all cases, these are political editors who are responsible for reporting on the party in their editorial offices.

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As the deputy spokesman of the AfD state association in Thuringia announced on Saturday evening, no journalists will be allowed to attend the party’s election campaign for the state elections on Sunday.

The media companies are protesting against the exclusion because other media were allowed to attend the event, which is important for public information, and there was therefore reason to worry about equal treatment of the media and a restriction of press freedom. They were represented by the law firm Partsch & Partner.

The court had already ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in a decision on August 21, but without an oral hearing or hearing of the opposing side. The AfD then lodged an objection and applied to the Thuringian Constitutional Court to suspend the regional court’s decision until a new decision was made, as the right to procedural equality of arms had been violated. The Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the AfD on Friday and suspended the effectiveness of the decision until the regional court had decided on the objection.

In its application to the Constitutional Court, the AfD claimed that the journalists filing the lawsuit had been rejected “with reference to limited space.” In fact, the AfD initially did not want to explicitly give any reasons to WELT and only mentioned a lack of space after the publisher’s legal department had announced that it would review the decision. To date, the AfD has not given any reasons for rejecting the accreditation requests to other media filing lawsuits, or has only given them when asked.

After the media’s lawsuit, the Thuringian AfD had already made contradictory statements, suggesting a first come, first served procedure (accreditation based on the order in which it was received), although several other press representatives had only been accredited long after the complaining media’s accreditation requests. The spokesman for the regional association also claimed that “only those” journalists had been accredited “who are anything but close to the AfD”. In fact, two journalists from the AfD-affiliated “Junge Freiheit” had been admitted. The full list of admitted media is not known.

The Erfurt Regional Court’s ruling is not yet final. The AfD could appeal to the Thuringian Higher Regional Court.