Berlin court has ordered parliamentary squad to lift ban on far-right lawmakers

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.21-113643/https://www.ft.com/content/0d43970a-e3a6-4871-820a-18e5736f5572

The German parliament’s football team was adamant that it already had enough rightwingers. But FC Bundestag has been thrown into crisis after a Berlin court overturned a ban on members of the far-right Alternative for Germany from joining the squad.

In a microcosm of the fraught debate about how to handle the AfD — which last month claimed a historic second-place finish in federal elections — the club must now decide how to respond to the ruling and whether to allow the far right MPs to take part in its weekly matches.

“More than 20 per cent of the population voted for us and want us to be represented in different offices in the parliament — and also in FC Bundestag,” said Malte Kaufmann, an AfD Bundestag member who campaigned against the ban. “This is an example of how opposition rights are trampled in Germany.”

  • adr1anMEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    Not that the article answers this, but I found this interesting:

    The team dates back to 1967, when it was founded by west German parliamentarians in the then capital of Bonn — a time when the main centre-left and centre-right parties together held more than 90 per cent of the seats. They play weekly matches against other amateur workplace teams from business, culture and civil society, as well as an annual contest against other parliamentary teams from elsewhere in Europe. Players over the years have included former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, former finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble and Joschka Fischer, the country’s first Green foreign minister. Two weeks before German reunification in 1990, the team played against members of the “People’s Chamber” of the communist east German republic.