By Euronews
Published on
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A scheduled live, open-air television interview with the co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Alice Weidel, was drowned out on Sunday by boisterous protesters.
The demonstrators, which positioned themselves across the River Spree from the televised set-up in Berlin’s government quarter, sang songs, blew whistles and shouted anti-AfD slogans.
Weidel and her host, public broadcaster ARD’s Markus Preiß, had to lean forward multiple times to understand the questions posed by the other.
Both Weidel and Preiß acknowledged the “difficult conditions,” saying that at times it was almost impossible to understand each other.
“I’ve got an echo in my ear, now I can’t hear anything,” Weidel said at one point, before removing an earplug from her ear and continuing the interview.
The activist group, the Centre for Political Beauty, claimed responsibility for the rally, explaining that they equipped a bus with extremely powerful loudspeakers for the occasion.
The group have a history of planning disruptive protests, including recently hanging a banner up on the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin depicting Weidel and Chancellor Friedrich Merz kissing.
Twenty-five people were involved in the protest, which took place with no arrests.
Weidel, later posting clips of the interview on X, claimed that the protest was organised by an NGO.
“By the way, this is what it looks like when the Tagesschau programme conducts a summer interview with the AfD in CDU-governed Berlin,” Weidel wrote on X.
A spokesperson for the broadcaster that organised the interview, ARD, said that it would “drew conclusions” from the incident and “take precautions in the future.”
“An undisturbed course of the interviews is in our interest and above all in the interest of the audience” the spokeswoman said in response to a DPA inquiry.
Politician Carsten Linnemann, a member of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) criticised the action, arguing that the protest drew favourable attention to the AfD.
“If you want to make the AfD strong, you should disturb such interviews,” Linnemann told domestic media, adding he recommended counteracting the AfD in terms of their policies and content rather than arrange protest action.
Weidel’s interview was part of a series of “summer interviews” typically given by the leaders of Germany’s largest political parties to public broadcaster ARD.
The AfD are currently the second largest political force in Germany’s parliament and in the polls, where latest figures show them achieving 25%, just behind the CDU with 27%.
