Jörg Meuthen
Jörg Hubert Meuthen (; born 29 June 1961) is a German economist serving as Federal spokesman for Alternative for Germany (AfD) from July 2015 until his resignation in January 2022. He was frontrunner for the AfD at the 2016 Baden-Württemberg state election and has been a Member of Parliament and parliamentary leader since March 2016. Since the end of 2017, Meuthen has been a member of the European Parliament and deputy chairman of the EFDD. He was the leading candidate of the AfD for the 2019 European Parliament election. Life. Meuthen is a professor of political economy and  finance at the Academy of Kehl Initially close to the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (FDP), he joined the AfD because of its eurosceptic positions. He strongly defends economic liberalism. He also adopts national-conservative positions and a rhetoric considered xenophobic against migrants and Muslims. Nevertheless, he is married to the Russian-born Natalia Zvekic, whose ex-husband came from Yugoslavia. He was leader of the AfD in the 2016 regional elections in Baden-Württemberg and has been a member of parliament and parliamentary leader since March 2016. In November 2017, he joined the European Parliament following the resignation of  Beatrix von Storch. Re-elected MEP in May 2019, he is a member of the parliamentary group Identity and Democracy (ID). While he maintains that "the AfD must be a bourgeois party with a bourgeois reason and endowed with an appearance of seriousness," he is strongly challenged in 2020 by the trend Der Flügel of the party, of which he had one of the leaders excluded because of his neo-Nazi past, to the point that the hypothesis of a split is evoked. He is accused of wanting to polish the image of the AfD, to assert his personal ambitions  and to obtain the position of head of the list and therefore of candidate for the chancellorship of the AfD for the Bundestag elections. He was booed at the party congress in November 2020, and was then targeted by a motion of no confidence that received 47 per cent of the votes. The regional film fund fired CEO Hans Joachim Mendig over a controversial meeting with Jörg Meuthen in September 2019. Meuthen announced in October 2021 that he would not be running in the next leadership election. Political views. Meuthen was initially considered part of the Bernd Lucke-related, more  economically liberal and moderate wing of the AfD near the start of the party's founding. He has described himself as an economic liberal but "pretty conservative" on other issues. Following the election of Frauke Petry as AfD chairwoman, Meuthen was seen to ally himself with the party's more right-wing faction. In 2016, he expressed support for what he termed a "conservative reformation" in Germany and argued against what he regards as lingering influence of the West German student movement on German politics. He has expressed opposition to extremist elements within the AfD. European Union. In 2015, Meuthen  stated he was not a "Europe hater" but opposed the Eurozone, claiming the Euro currency had "perverted" European unity. In 2019, he argued that the European People's Party had moved too far to the left and criticized the EPP's decision to expel Viktor Orban's Fidesz party. Immigration. Meuthen has expressed opposition to the immigration and asylum policies under Angela Merkel. During an AfD party conference in 2016, he stated "We are opposed to allowing immigration in such large numbers with open eyes that we will no longer recognize our own country in just a few years. The  leading culture in Germany is not Islam, but the Christian - occidental culture. The call of the muezzin cannot claim to be as self-evident as the Christian ringing of church bells." Meuthen has argued that asylum seekers should be granted temporary resident permits as opposed to full citizenship and permeant residency. During the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, Meuthen stated that Germany should suspend its membership of the Schengen agreement, arguing that open borders were contributing to the spread of the virus. Foreign policy. Meuthen has expressed support for Israel and has called on the German government to ban the  Lebanese based militant group Hezbollah. Resignation. On January 28, 2022, Meuthen declared that he would resign from the party chairmanship with immediate effect and resign from the AfD. He justified this with the fact that he had lost the power struggle with the formally dissolved right-wing extremist "Der Flügel" ("the wing") over the political direction of AfD. Meuthen criticized that the party had developed far to the right and was in large parts no longer concurent with the liberal democratic basic order in Germany.