Amateurish, "cheap"

AfD not happy with poster donation from the Ländle

Posters of this kind have been "decorating" a number of German cities since Friday.

(Bild: teutopress GmbH)

A layout that takes some getting used to, a questionable style: according to the German news magazine "Spiegel", the AfD's applause over the 6395 election posters donated by Gerhard Dingler, the former managing director of the Vorarlberg Freedom Party, is said to be limited.

With 2.35 million euros, you could do all sorts of nice things - buy a house in Tuscany, for example, a valuable painting, or for the eccentric, a flight into space. Which you can also do, of course: Donate 6395 election posters to the far-right AfD in the form of a donation in kind, because you want to prevent Ukraine from being ammunitioned with German Taurus missiles. This is what happened in the case of entrepreneur Gerhard Dingler, who was managing director of the Vorarlberg FPÖ for several years.

Attempts by the AfD to intervene failed
These large-format posters have now been hanging in a number of German cities since Friday. Curiously enough, it is not only people who are far removed from the AfD who are turning up their noses at the sight of them, enthusiasm within the AfD itself is also said to be at an end, as reported by "Der Spiegel".

The posters, financed by the million-euro donation, can be seen throughout Germany, according to the AfD:

Dingler as "creative director"
This is mainly due to the fact that Dingler himself acted as "creative director". "We tried to influence the poster campaign to a certain extent, as the layout and slogans are not our style," AfD federal treasurer Carsten Hütter told Der Spiegel. But attempts to intervene had failed: "Mr. Dingler wanted to stick to his designs for the most part."

Posters look "cheap"
The most striking thing about the posters is that they look amateurish, not to say cheap. Visually, a wild potpourri of different font sizes and colors - and linguistically more club than foil: "Keep destroying jobs with CDU + Red/Green? That's why AFD! The bourgeois alternative", can be read in large letters.

The fact that the AfD is located in the political center as a "bourgeois alternative" is quite daring for a party that the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies as a "suspected right-wing extremist case". But at least the poster series meets the minimum standard: the motifs are likely to be unobjectionable under criminal law - at least this was the result of a precautionary check commissioned by the AfD federal office ...