Photo: imago/Karina Hessland
Surprise: Vera Lengsfeld has still not joined the AfD. But the CDU left them last Thursday. The reasoning is almost a bit too boring: “I have been very critical of the CDU since Merkel’s time and had hoped that the course would be corrected, but I don’t see that happening,” she told dpa. Friedrich Merz is apparently still too soft and windy for Lengsfeld.
The 71-year-old was previously a member of the “Union of Values” on the right-wing fringe of the CDU, as was her son Philipp. Both used to sit for the CDU in the Bundestag, and both were treated badly in the GDR. Because they were for the independent peace movement, the mother was thrown out of the country and the son was thrown out of school. It later emerged that she had been spied on by her own husband.
In 1990 she entered the Bundestag for Alliance 90/Greens and began her long journey to the right. In 2009, she achieved 11.6 percent in a left-wing Berlin constituency, the worst result nationwide of all the CDU’s direct candidates. Only her poster caused a stir: “We have more to offer” was written under two photos in which she and Merkel were seen with deep necklines. After that she was pretty much down in the media. Today she works as a “one-woman company,” as she calls herself, for right-wing internet media that also care about anti-feminism.
Now she has in mind “a small but fine competition for the Union and the AfD,” as she writes on her website, something for the middle class, which is traditionally for the right what the proletariat once was for the left. A few small parties in Thuringia want to join forces and her son Phillip is also planning an “Alliance for Europe”. She wants to support it, but not run for office. Because Lengsfeld also considers “the party system to be outdated.” She looks at it from the right shoulder.
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