Nordrhein-Westfalen Landtag, Plenarprotokoll
17/134, pp. 53-54.
Herr President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.
(The speaker holds up a newspaper.)
The Junge Freiheit
is a conservative weekly newspaper which just celebrated its 35th
birthday. A special history binds this newspaper with our State, the State of
Nordrhein-Westfalen [NRW], its
Interior Ministry and its so-called Constitution Defense. The elders will
perhaps remember.
For years in the officials’ annual reports, it was written
up as extreme right and thereby stigmatized. Under these circumstances, it was
naturally difficult for the little publication to find subscribers and advertisers
or even just sales venues. For who would want to thus be brought into
association?
For many newspapers, this would have been a death sentence, since
an economic existence under such circumstances is scarcely possible, then
before the time of the internet. Yet the editorship was made up of idealists
and resisted. The former attorney general von Stahl of the FDP brought an
action before the Federal Constitutional Court, and the Junge Freiheit won the lawsuit.
The so-called “Junge
Freiheit decision” was even path-breaking. The Karlsruhe judges decided
that the publication in the so-called Constitution Defense report harmed the Junge Freiheit in its basic right to
freedom of the press according to Article 5 of the Basic Law. This basic right
secures the freedom to produce and distribute printed statements and thereby
the communications medium of the press. Thus far the verdict. That is now on 16
years. There is still a Junge Freiheit,
and it is one of the few publications in print with a growing circulation.
The NRW Interior
Minister is no longer red; he is meantime black and is called Reul. This was evidently
not learned in his house. Respect for freedom of the press has also not
increased there. Thus the CDU minister openly conducts himself exactly like his
SPD predecessor in bestowing advisory performance grades for the press. Ja, worse still, he insinuates a radical
right attitude to police officers who read the Junge Freiheit. And he shall receive a bloody nose. Thus the
verdict of the Administrative Court in Düsseldorf on May 21:
“The respondent” – that is Herr Reul – “is ordered to cease to assert, to let be asserted, to spread abroad or let be spread abroad, that the reading of the Junge Freiheit can be evaluated as a warning signal for a right-wing extremist attitude.”
It is good that at least our courts for the most part still
function, when in the ministries one is after all no longer so exactly taken
with the Constitution.
Unfortunately, not every publication can avail itself of
expensive attorneys and processes. Otherwise, Herr Reul would probably have a
whole series of proceedings by the neck. I want for once to name two examples. Flinkfeed, a conservative on-line
magazine, was scarcely on the market than the president of the so-called
Constitution Defense NRW, before the
Interior Committee and the gathered, competing press, declared it to be somehow
anti-constitutional. “Anti-feminist” texts initially sufficed for proof. Thus is
feminism now apparently an integral part of the Constitution.
Then subsequently also the State institute for media, which
you have made into a censorship authority, sent pages-long warnings [Abmahnungen] which somehow landed in the
press, and the young media makers needed to give up, since they could not avail
themselves of expensive attorneys.
Still, the makers of the right-liberal magazine Krautzone have not given up. Yet they
too without a close examination by the Ministry are again placed
(The speaker hold up an edition of the magazine.)
in the muck corner, naturally the right-wing muck corner.
This may be looked up in the diverse publications of the Landtag.
Herr Reul, it is difficult to believe that this is just an
accident or an incompetence. It is much more about how you and your friends of
the other so-called democratic parties, still as before, suppress critical
reporting. It would indeed be most preferred by you if our media landscape
would consist of the WDR and the broadcast
media group of your party friends Holthoff-Pförtner.
It is then also unbelievable when you and your party friends
and the representatives of the other old parties shed crocodile tears over
Hungary and Herr Orban. You may be more supple – I grant you that – yet basically
what you are doing here with a free press is not one jot better.
Helmut Seifen (AfD): It is so!
My delegation, the AFD delegation, wants a free and
independent press landscape; the more offerings, the better. We hold our
citizens to be sufficiently intelligent to make for themselves their own
picture, and our police as well so. They should be allowed to read what they
want, whether it be the Junge Freiheit,
the Rheinsiche Post, vorwärts or the Neue Deutshcland. A minister who calls himself democratic must
support this.
Herr Reul, it would be time – you have adequate opportunity –
to apologize, not only to the Junge
Freiheit but also to its readers and to those readers who are amongst our
police officers.
Many thanks.
[trans: tem]
