AGI Profiles: Alexander Gauland

Jakob Grein

Halle Foundation/AGI Intern

Jakob Grein is a research intern at AGI in summer 2024. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree in security studies at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. Mr. Grein focuses on transatlantic security and intelligence but is also interested in energy security, geoeconomics and grand strategy. He earned his undergraduate degree at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Before coming to Washington, he completed the Bluebook Traineeship at the European Commission and worked as a research assistant on energy geopolitics and climate change. In the forthcoming academic year, Mr. Grein will serve as the deputy editor of the Georgetown Security Studies Review. He is also a candidate for the Certificate in Diplomatic Studies, administered by the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.

Member of the Bundestag and Honorary Chairman of the AfD

Dr. Alexander Gauland is the honorary chairman of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and a member of the Bundestag. Together with the two current chairs of the AfD, Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, Gauland forms the leadership of the AfD. He was originally elected into the Bundestag in 2017, riding the wave of protest votes which mounted after the refugee crisis of 2015.

Youth and Education

Alexander Gauland was born in 1941 in Chemnitz, Saxony, as the son of a policeman. His father, perhaps in a foreshadowing of Gauland’s conservative political character, named his son after Czar Alexander I of Russia—a monarch was known for being fundamentally opposed to foreign cultural influences and seeking a ‘pure’ Russian culture. After completing his high school education in Chemnitz (then Karl-Marx-Stadt), he was denied access to university by the Socialist government. The young Alexander then made the decision to flee East Germany and continue his life and career in the West. He began his university studies in 1960. Alexander Gauland studied history, political science, and law at the Philipps-University in Marburg as well as the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen. He wrote his first bar exam in 1966. In 1970, he received his doctorate in law for his dissertation titled, “The principle of legitimacy in the practice of states since the Congress of Vienna.”

Career

Alexander Gauland’s political activities commenced during his time at university. He was an active member of the Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (RCDS), a conservative, center-right student association. Gauland, as the University Elder (Universitätsältester, akin to a student president), led the student assembly of the University of Marburg. Gauland’s predecessor in this position was Walter Wallmann. Wallmann was a mentor for Gauland, and the two men crossed paths several times throughout their lives.

After completing university, Gauland served as an employee of the Press Office of the Federal Government from 1970 to 1972. Thereafter, he held the role of Press Attaché at the German Consulate General in Edinburgh until 1975. He returned to Germany and worked for the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) in the parliamentary faction, a party of which he became a member in 1973. In the Bundestag, Gauland met an old acquaintance who had been elected to the parliament in 1972: Walter Wallmann, then serving as the Chief Parliamentary Secretary (Parlamentarischer Geschäftsführer) of the CDU. He quickly took Gauland under his wing, making Gauland his personal assistant. In 1977, after achieving stellar results in local elections, Wallmann became mayor of Frankfurt. Gauland was made the new mayor’s chief of staff. In this role, Gauland was faced with an unusual crisis. As a consequence of the Vietnam War, refugees—often referred to as boat people—arrived in many European countries, including Germany. Gauland organized the transfer and accommodation of Vietnamese refugees in Frankfurt. This engagement contrasts sharply with Gauland’s radical anti-immigrant positions later in his life.

Gauland’s and Wallmann’s paths remained intertwined. In 1986, after the catastrophe of Chernobyl, Helmut Kohl created a new federal ministry for environmental affairs and nuclear safety and appointed Wallmann as head of this new ministry. As this newly created institution needed to be built from scratch, Gauland was taken on and tasked with establishing the internal administration. Another successful state election in Hesse in 1987 prompted Wallmann to switch roles and assume the position of Minister-President of Hesse. Gauland accompanied Wallmann once more and became State Secretary in the State Chancellery of Hesse, serving from 1987 to 1991.

During his tenure as State Secretary, Gauland became embroiled in a political scandal which became known as the “Gauland Affair.” He wanted to replace a senior official in the State Chancellery with his party friend and colleague Wolfgang Egerter. This attempted nepotism was met with political backlash and led to court proceedings, which were however closed. Gauland survived the affair and continued in this position until 1991, when an election loss for the CDU swept both Gauland and Wallmann out of office. Gauland used this opportunity to switch career paths, becoming the Editor in Chief of the Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung (MAZ) in Potsdam, a position he held for fifteen years until 2006.

From Conservatism to Populism

Gauland’s ideological roots lay firmly in conservative thought, which he publicized in writing. In 2000, he published a notable article titled, “Wanted: Conservative Reformers.” Gauland penned an earlier book entitled, What is Conservatism? Polemic Against the False German Traditions, which was published in 1991. His most famous book, Instructions On Being Conservative, came out in 2002.

Gauland was a well-respected thinker in conservative circles. He became a member of the Berliner Kreis in 2007. This CDU club sought to reinvigorate what they saw as the core values of the CDU: Christian thought, conservatism, and economic liberalism. However, the aim of this informal grouping—to reorient the CDU in a more conservative direction, opposing Merkel’s pragmatic centrism—never materialized.

Gauland became increasingly disillusioned with Merkel’s CDU. Four years after joining the Berliner Kreis and seeing what must have felt like a slow decay of ‘his’ CDU, he published a scathing letter of appeal against Merkel’s course. In his 2011 editorial, he bemoaned the decision to shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants. He cast doubts on the legally dubious measures to save the euro during the eurozone crisis in 2010. And he took aim at Merkel’s fight for the Frauenquote, the endeavor to finally reach parity between men and women in all sectors of society. Gauland cited an anecdote from the French Revolution, clearly aimed at Chancellor Merkel, where he wrote, “Your majesty, I am overjoyed to be able to witness your departure.”

A departure did occur, just not Merkel’s. Gauland finally left the CDU in 2013. Together with other members of the conservative party, Gauland was one of the eighteen founding members of the newly created Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The founding members, led by Bernd Lucke, were initially brought together by their critique of the massive economic bailouts for the eurozone, which the German government subsidized with €190 billion. However, the program of the newfound party extended beyond Euroskepticism. From the moment of its inception, Gauland’s AfD was inextricably linked to ethnic (völkisch) conservatism and nationalism. Already in 2013, founding members such as Konrad Adam garnered attention with demeaning comments about immigrants and revisionist opinions on Germany’s pluralist and multicultural identity.

On this platform and under the banner of ‘protest against the establishment,’ the AfD began its political existence. In the 2013 federal elections, the AfD secured a result of 4.7 percent, barely missing the 5 percent of votes required for entry into parliament. Gauland used this political momentum. As the Spitzenkandidat (lead candidate) of the AfD Brandenburg, he campaigned successfully in the state elections of 2014. The AfD gained 12.2 percent of the vote, which brought Gauland his first elected post. He remained a member of the parliament of Brandenburg and whip of the AfD faction for three years until the federal elections of 2017. In that year, the AfD entered the Bundestag for the first time, backed by 12.6 percent of the German electorate. As a leader in the AfD, Gauland became a member of the federal diet, serving as the AfD’s whip from 2017 to 2021. Following the federal elections of 2021, Gauland abstained from a candidacy as frontrunner and has since been the honorary chairman of the AfD. He still holds a seat in the Bundestag. Gauland, part of the leadership of the Alternative from the very beginning, has led the party’s transformation, which changed not only the character of the AfD but also his own.

The Metamorphosis

Since the founding of the AfD in 2013, the party has radically transformed. The founding chairman Bernd Lucke left in 2015, his colleague and co-founder Frauke Petry in 2017, and Konrad Adams in 2020. But Gauland stayed. And he is the metamorphosis personified. In a Kafkaesque turn of events, the AfD was infiltrated by hard-right extremists. It turned into a political movement under surveillance by German security services, for fear of their radical ambitions.

Many companions of Gauland have wondered what happened. Ernst Gerhardt, a seasoned CDU politician acquainted with Gauland since 1977, described him as curious, tolerant, and a great humanitarian. Nothing hinted at this descent into radicalism. Indeed, in 1993,  Gauland signed an open letter calling for a “humane immigration policy” and supporting “a self-imposed obligation of generosity for the [German] society.” This sounds nothing like the contemporary Gauland, who relativizes the worst period in German history by likening Nazi Germany to nothing but a small stain of “bird shit” on an otherwise prestigious history. It sounds nothing like a politician who openly colluded with the right fringes of the AfD (Gauland fought tooth and nail to prevent the exclusion of Andreas Kalbitz from the AfD; see his profile here). And it sounds nothing like a party cadre, who together with Björn Höcke, purged the AfD of moderates.

It is difficult to assess what exactly incited this shift in Gauland, or if he always held these views and is only now expressing them publicly. Gauland was one of the first signatories to the ‘Erfurt Resolution,’ which inaugurated the völkisch-nationalist Flügel movement within the AfD. This movement explicitly, repeatedly, and deliberately drew on Nazi rhetoric. While this is not damning evidence in the legal sense, it does support the thesis that the right-wing turn in the AfD echoed Gauland’s core political beliefs.

One does not make the statements Gauland has made and tolerate the individuals in a party oneself has founded if these opinions do not reflect personal beliefs. Already in 1991, he wrote in the Frankfurt Journal that there are “human limits on the tolerance for aliens.” In his aforementioned book Instructions on Being Conservative he argued that “everything which stops the decay, contains globalization, is therefore good and right: traditions and myths, acts of faith and cultures, ethnicities and borders.” In a 2009 interview he proclaimed that “the problem [Germany] really has is the Islamic immigrants, because that is a different culture.” When tracing Gauland’s political identity, one finds a man who has always held folkish beliefs, but has only begun to transform these into political action within the ascendancy of the Alternative für Deutschland.

Corroborating this thesis and Gauland’s coziness to the extreme right is an anecdote from 2015. Two years after the founding of the AfD, when it still included moderate elements, Gauland traveled to Russia. He met the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofejew, a neo-fascist businessman, who is said to have deep ties to Valdimir Putin. Malofejew sees the war in Ukraine as a sacred conflict and hopes for a ‘reunification’ of Ukraine with Russia. Malofejew shares these ideas with an even more incendiary mind, sometimes called Putin’s philosopher or the brains behind the war in Ukraine: Aleksandr Dugin. Gauland met his Russian namesake just one day after he dined with Malofejew. And Gauland called Dugin’s delusions “intellectually interesting.” While this does not entail support, it nonetheless points in a very particular, unsavory direction. The meetings between the Russians and Gauland were arranged by Manuel Ochsenreiter. Ochsenreiter was, up until his death in 2021 in Moscow, one of the most influential yet obscure figures in nationalist circles in Germany. He had connections to Hungarian fascists, pro-Russian politicians in Donbas, Iranian antisemites, and the Syrian government. Ochsenreiter was a worldwide networker for right-wing movements and reactionary forces. German security services have even pursued the suspicion that Ochsenreiter may have ordered arson attacks in Ukraine. This man not only established the connection between Gauland and Dugin, but also worked for the AfD faction, led by Gauland, in the German Bundestag.

Gauland’s continuous dance with the extremist right makes for a compelling case that he wanted and supported the AfD’s embrace of folkish nationalism and right-wing demagoguery. It is impossible to ascertain what Gauland’s true motivations and beliefs are. But the metamorphosis of the AfD and of himself are strong indicators that this had been a political moment for which Gauland had been waiting for a long time. Gauland’s gradual shift may just be an insidious process of public radicalization, akin to a pyromaniac, who first plays around with a lighter, and in the absence of backlash, continuously escalates and eventually burns down a house.