East Wind of Change

“We, the normal people”: Hans-Thomas Tillschneider likes to wave his index finger in an instructive manner

The deputy state chairman of the AfD Saxony-Anhalt is a modest man. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider likes to hold back or withdraw in public conversation formats. If you ask him a question, he hesitates. If he posts something on X, he often deletes it shortly afterwards. A thoughtful, self-critical man. Someone who likes to stay in the background. While the chairman of the Saxony-Anhalt AfD parliamentary group, Ulrich Siegmund, has the aura of a regionally successful pop singer who rocks every Thermomix party in a circle of tipsy housewives, Tillschneider seems like a teacher who likes to explain that the word “humor” comes from Latin and means “liquid”. It doesn't get any funnier with him. He is a serious man. A thinker. A thought leader, which is no small distinction in a party full of great minds.

But with Tillschneider, even more than with someone like Beatrix von Storch, you feel this inner connection to real intellectual giants. Aleksandr Dugin, for example, or Ayatollah Khomeini. It is probably in their honor that he wears a bushy beard, which - as if on purpose - is not as magnificent as that of the Berlin newspaper tycoon Holger Friedrich. Tillschneider doesn't have to be the longest. For good reason, appearances are not important to the 48-year-old. It is important to him that he still has all the Russian mugs in his cupboard. This is anything but a given in his party. But why exactly does the Romanian-born Banat Swabian wave a Russian flag when German identity is so important to him? Quite simply: In Russia there is a “way of life rooted in tradition, which increasingly sees itself as an alternative to the tradition, identity and genderless rainbow society of the West.” The Islamic scholar may also say something similar about Iran, Saudi Arabia and Namibia.

Anyone who listens carefully will understand: Tillschneider wants to risk a little more Russia and Iran in Germany for reasons of identity politics. That's why you don't have to hang homosexuals from construction cranes - the AfD politician is moderate. In the case of Alice Weidel, it may be enough to keep her from politics and lead her to a God-ordained housewife existence. “If the peoples of Europe want to survive, they have to break the supremacy of the rainbow,” Tillschneider once said in a speech to the state parliament. He identified the “Rainbow Empire” as an enemy. "We, the normal, sensible, rooted ones," would have recognized this - and: "In the resistance against this empire, Russia is closest to us."

Tillschneider says it clearly: Russia is great. And today's Germany isn't because it isn't German at all. German is what his Banater-Swabian parents in Romania probably taught him to be German: a loud slap now and then and otherwise keeping his mouth shut. Knock instead of cuddle. Suppression of sexuality instead of gays. 19th instead of 21st century. And nationalism instead of multiculturalism. Here Tillschneider, who is a great admirer of Islam, follows the tradition of the Salafists. Why democracy and human rights when you are rooted in your own tradition? That of Christianity, for example. According to the pious intellectual, this really has nothing to do with human rights, the equality of all, friendliness to foreigners and the modern guilt cult of rainbow trullas. It is far too German for that.

The cross and lateral thinker Tillschneider also knows why Christianity is so degenerate in the USA and so pure in Russia. But he doesn't say it. It is this thoughtful modesty that sometimes keeps him silent where others would say "vagrant," "East Coast," or "high finance." Tillschneider prefers to say "unipolar world order" or explains that Islam is being used, among other things, by the Central Council of Jews "to bring about multicultural conditions in Germany." It's not about Islam at all, but about "weakening German culture" - and "ultimately the abolition of our people."

Russia is definitely better off. He agrees with his friend, the party-loving and sociable Jürgen Elsässer from Compact magazine, and founded an association called Ostwind with him in 2023 to maintain peace and friendship with Russia. After all, Putin is a “real guy, a real man with a healthy set of values” in the Kremlin. But only those who are not contaminated by the decadent globalism virus understand this. The pious patriot who likes to end his speeches with “God is with us” is correspondingly misunderstood. God is finished with the AfD in our own country. Even right-wing extremists who are ready to commit a coup, whom Tillschneider does not shy away from, cannot always completely follow him. For example, when he declares the Germans under Hitler to be the Palestinians of Europe: “Israel is punishing the Palestinians collectively for the crimes of Hamas. By the way, exactly the same applies to the Germans and the Holocaust. You cannot hold the entire German people responsible for the crimes of a few."

Besides, Annalena Baerbock has done much worse things. For example, career as a woman.

And what about the understanding of the people in his own party? They just let Hans-Thomas Tillschneider do it. The fact that he has been under surveillance by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution since 2020, writes a column loyal to the Kremlin in the Russian daily newspaper Vedomosti, celebrated Putin's birthday in the Russian embassy in Berlin in October 2025 and spreads anti-Semitic conspiracy myths that are likely to command respect from Islamist rappers - these are private matters. And they don't stand out in the democratically elected party. Besides, Annalena Baerbock has done much worse things. For example, career as a woman.

Tillschneider, who has a full beard, is a dialectical thinker, a differentiator, someone who likes things complex. He is against early sexualization, but for the right of 63-year-old songwriters to lie naked on 16-year-old girls and make love. Of course, only as long as it is consensual. He rejects "anti-male propaganda" against Konstantin Wecker as naturally as he rejects Muslim marriages if the girl is not of age. Such trains of thought tend to be too high for Siegmund. That's why "Uli" is the man for the popular party, while "Tille" is working out an "education reform" in the background. And Germany should be a little more like Russia: autocratic, authoritarian, poor and anti-social.