The AfD has lost one of its more familiar faces. The Hessian member of the Bundestag Joana Cotar announced on Monday that she was leaving the party and parliamentary group. The AfD “crossed too many red lines,” she wrote in a statement. On her website, Cotar, who belonged to the moderate current of the party and had meanwhile been a member of the federal executive board, justified her move with internal party intrigues and the foreign policy course of the AfD. She wrote: “In the fight against opponents within the party, constant bullying is the order of the day – fueled by the top of the party and its networks.” In addition, the “fight for a better Germany” has receded into the background.
The graduate political scientist joined the AfD in 2013, the year it was founded, and was a member of the federal executive board for several years. Cotar had recently found no significant support in the party for her efforts to give the AfD a more moderate image. At the federal party conference in June in Riesa, she was no longer elected to the board. She herself interpreted Riesa’s personnel decisions as a defeat for the moderate camp.
According to Cotar, he has now left the party and the parliamentary group. But she wants to keep her mandate in the Bundestag. The exit was “not easy for her after almost ten years,” explained Cotar. “After all, I helped build the party in Hesse.”
In contrast to other former AfD members who had left the party in recent years, the digital politician Cotar did not justify her move directly with a further shift to the right by the AfD. Rather, Cotar wrote: “The extreme right-wing fringe of the AfD was and is not the problem, it was always in the minority.” More problematic are “the opportunists who give up their convictions for mandates, let themselves be bought and tomorrow represent the opposite of what they still stand for today”.
She herself stands “for a constructive, liberal-conservative policy based on the Basic Law,” explained Cotar. These included “the principle of personal responsibility, the recognition of achievements, a lean state, freedom of expression without censorship or surveillance and genuine patriotism”. In the statement, the AfD attested to “opportunism and constant bullying in the fight for posts and mandates” and “the establishment of corrupt networks in the party”.
In addition, Cotar criticized “the close proximity of leading AfD officials to the President of the Russian Federation,” Vladimir Putin. She doesn’t want to and won’t support this anymore. She stated: “The pandering of the AfD to the dictatorial and inhuman regimes in Russia, China and now also Iran are unworthy of an upright democratic and patriotic party.”
The parliamentary manager of the AfD parliamentary group, Bernd Baumann, tried to portray Cotar’s departure as the result of unsuccessful candidacies for top positions in the party and parliamentary group. He said it was more about “disappointments at not having prevailed”. It had been known for a long time that Cotar “felt unhappy”. He criticized that she wants to keep her mandate.
Internally, Cotar belonged to the camp of former party leader Jörg Meuthen, who left the AfD in January. Meuthen stood for an economically liberal and more moderate course in the AfD. This current has recently lost a lot of influence in the party, while the right-wing national camp around the Thuringian state and parliamentary group leader Björn Höcke grew stronger.
Cotar had applied together with Joachim Wundrak for the top candidate for the federal election in 2021, but was defeated by the faction leaders Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel. When the federal board was filled in June in Riesa, she got nothing – her name was not on a list of personnel proposals that party leader Chrupalla had drawn up.
Shortly before the party congress, after a series of poor results in state elections, Cotar had openly opposed Chrupalla and his course. “The success story of the AfD ended with Tino Chrupalla,” she said at the time. “He does not represent the entire party, nor does he convince the voters.”
In June, Cotar commented on the personnel and direction decisions made at the party congress in Riesa, saying that she would have wished for an “image change” for the AfD through a more moderate appearance. “They didn’t want to listen to me,” she said at the time. “That was not wanted at the federal level.”
The AfD has lost numerous prominent members since it was founded almost ten years ago. One of them is the European Parliamentarian Jörg Meuthen. The long-standing party leader, with whom Cotar pursued common goals on the party executive for a while, left the AfD in January. Cotar is the fifth member to leave the AfD parliamentary group since last year’s general election. The faction shrank from 83 to 78 members.
