AfDlerin sues against dismissal: God's firewall

It is planned that a conciliation hearing regarding the immediate dismissal of daycare teacher Kerstin Zimmermann will take place next Friday at the Braunschweig Labor Court. However, such appointments are often postponed. Either way, “not much will happen,” suspects Zimmermann’s lawyer Dirk Schmitz M.A., who would still have to travel from Iserlohn, 300 kilometers away.

His client, he reveals to the taz, “has now also received a proper notice of termination”. “As suspected, only with one reason,” says Schmitz, “that she ran for the AfD in the local elections.” Zimmermann also won the mandate in the local council of Salzgitter-West, which various AfDfluencers and all sorts of right-wing news portals celebrate as a huge success, while they complain about the dismissal as completely unfair.

She obviously isn't. Legally questionable, perhaps. But it would only be unfair if Caritas Salzgitter had fired the bodybuilding world champion on a mere whim, because of her sporting success or based on rules that were subsequently established.

But it doesn't: Caritas is the Catholic social welfare agency. And because churches claim to be derived entirely from their faith in all its manifestations, they can also set particularly clear requirements for the lifestyle of their employees. This is called the third way in labor law. In the past, religiously run facilities even required their cleaning staff to have the appropriate confession, citing this fact.

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That has loosened up a bit. But churches still do not accept when employees entrusted with the preaching engage in “anti-church activities” in their private lives. According to the explanations presented by the German Bishops' Conference in 2024 "on dealing with extremist positions", this applies not only to pastors but also to employees in the educational and educational sector. And as examples of “anti-church activities,” the document cites both candidacy and election advertising for “right-wing extremist parties and those that proliferate on the fringes of this ideology” – namely the AfD. So it almost seems as if the bodybuilder ran into this firewall on purpose.

In any case, Zimmermann's candidacy will be subjected to a stress test at the very lowest level of local self-government. Whether these rules are permissible, whether Caritas can consider a candidacy as personal behavior and punish it in the same way as misanthropic statements, or whether it has to accept it like passive party membership, has not yet been legally clarified. “It will definitely go to the Federal Constitutional Court,” says lawyer Schmitz M.A., who, when asked how his client came to see him in distant Iserlohn, points out that he has “published a lot on the subject”.

That's not untrue. But this probably doesn't mean scientific publications: The man operates primarily as a guest commentator for right-wing online newspapers, as an operator of hateful social media sites and as a clinic manager. He rarely practices as a lawyer, but mostly in Baden-Württemberg, where he represents AfDlers close to Höcken in court. And himself, albeit unsuccessfully: On May 20, the Offenburg regional court convicted him in the second instance for spreading unconstitutional propaganda. This is not yet legally binding. But for some, that's enough of a recommendation.