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AfD youth wing furious over Berlin pride parade ban

The Local Germany
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AfD youth wing furious over Berlin pride parade ban
CSD in Berlin in 2017. Photo: DPA

The youth wing of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has complained after being denied a stall at this year’s Berlin Pride event, Christopher Street Day (CSD), saying it has been unfairly excluded.

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CSD organizers have rejected an application by David Eckert, head of the Berlin chapter of AfD youth wing Junge Alternative, for a stall at Europe’s largest LGBT street party at the end of July.

Eckert, 26, took to Facebook to complain about the decision, publishing what he claimed was an email from CSD organizers saying that “people and organizations who try to create a climate of fear and exclusion such as the AfD … are not welcome” at the parade.   

The Berlin AfD youth leader accompanied the post with an explosive three minute video in which he claimed to represent conservative elements of the LGBT community who rejected mass immigration.

“Not every gay person wears vinyl and leather, struts around with a handbag and paints their nails,” said Eckert, citing a poll suggesting 12 percent of German LGBT voters supported the AfD.

SEE ALSO: 'I came to Berlin for Gay Pride 6 years ago, and never left'

Eckert added that the AfD saw itself as a “balwark” against illegal migrants, the majority of which he claimed supported Sharia law and came from places where gays faced violence and persecution. 

AfD leader Alice Weidel, herself a lesbian, has recently tried to reposition her party as protecting gays from immigrants, but has made no mention of LGBT refugees and asylum seekers who may themselves be fleeing such persecution.

In the past Eckert has got into hot water for comments about memorials to homosexual victims of the Nazis. Back in April 2017, while working for the AfD in Düsseldorf, Eckert questioned in a number of Facebook posts whether homosexual victims of Nazi persecution should be given their own memorial.

“Why should Nazi victims be differentiated between when they are commemorated?” he wrote on Facebook in response to news of a new memorial to homosexual victims at Ravensbrueck concentration camp. 

Christopher Street Day is an event held across Europe in memory of the New York Stonewall Riots in 1969. The Berlin event, which attracts an average of 500,000 attendees every year, is celebrating its 40th year this year under the motto: “My body, my identity, my life.”

Last year's event, which was held in the run up to the 2017 election, took place under the motto: "More of us every vote against the right."

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