Politics taz
AfD candidate for federal presidential election: Football is also right-wing
The AfD would like to nominate Thomas Berthold as a candidate for the highest state office. This also tells us how widespread right-wing extremist positions are in sport. more...
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Someone says something like this: “Only together can we take action against this parliamentary fascism.” There are many such sentences from Thomas Berthold. Berthold said his “favorite book” was “Secret Societies and their Power in the 20th Century,” an anti-Semitic work that has since been banned in Germany because of sedition.
The AfD has now presented the former professional footballer and 1990 world champion as its candidate for the office of Federal President. By the way, the AfD also explains to us what its commitment to opposing hatred of Jews looks like in practice: making an anti-Semite head of state.
Although Berthold was once a world-class player, he is still not as famous as he and Tino Chrupalla believe. The 1990 World Cup was Lothar Matthäus and Andy Brehme.
The nomination of Thomas Berthold by the extreme right-wing AfD tells us a lot about the understanding of the political significance of football in this country: it is not taken seriously as a sport, players are not respected as its representatives in public, but everyone picks one. The CSU politician Stephan Mayer said that Berthold was undoubtedly an outstanding professional footballer, but he considered the personnel to be absurd for the office of Federal President. And Ralf Stegner (SPD) said that Berthold had probably done too many “header exercises with a medicine ball”.
So we love our footballers, that's the message when they either say nothing or say exactly what you want to hear from them. The fact that football is a social field in which all political forces in this country express themselves is often ignored. And accordingly, people who consider themselves to be political decision-makers do not notice how worrying and even dangerous it is when right-wing extremist positions suddenly spread in football.
And that's not all: it's even more alarming that Thomas Berthold, a former world-class footballer, is trying to use sport as a field in which right-wing extremism is made presentable and representative.
Anyone who wants to can see how important it would be to get more involved with sport and to take it and the athletes more seriously, even when they say bad things. One can doubt that the motto "For you. For us. For Germany", which Jürgen Klopp hangs in the dressing room, is the best answer to right-wing extremism in the highest state office.