Björn Höcke

Björn Höcke was born in Lünen and grew up in Anhausen and Neuwied.^[6] Höcke's father was a teacher at State School for the Blind and Partially-Sighted (Neuwied) [de] while his mother was a nurse.^[7] His paternal grandparents were expelled Germans from East Prussia. Höcke took his Abitur at Rhein-Wied-Gymnasium in 1991.^[8]

Höcke studied sport and history at University of Giessen and at University of Marburg before working as a teacher.^[3][9] He taught at the Rhenanus School, a comprehensive school in Bad Sooden-Allendorf.^[10]

In 1986, Höcke was briefly a member of Junge Union, the joint youth organisation of the CDU/CSU coalition.^[11][12]

As one of the founders of AfD Thuringia, he was elected to the Landtag or state parliament of Thuringia following the 2014 election.^[13] He is the speaker of the parliamentary group of the AfD and the spokesman of the Thuringia Regional Association (Landesverband) of his party.^[14] He is said to be the leader of the "national-conservative wing" of the AfD,^[15] a faction known as the Flügel (the Wing),^[16][4] with which 40 percent of AfD party members identify themselves.^[17]

Previously a rather obscure regional politician of a new party, Höcke became known nationwide in 2015, when party leader Bernd Lucke was ousted in July and the 2015 European migrant crisis unfolded. In October 2015, one day after a knife attack on Cologne mayor Henriette Reker, during the political talkshow "Günther Jauch", Höcke pulled out a small German flag and stated, "3000 years of Europe, 1000 years of Germany".^[18]

In September 2019, Höcke threatened "massive consequences" to a ZDF journalist who refused to restart an interview after a series of difficult questions and asked party members whether various quotes were from a book Höcke had written or from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.^[19]

Höcke led the AfD in the 2019 Thuringian state election, where it doubled its vote share to 23% and overtook the main opposition party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), to place second.

In 2021, the moderate AfD co-leader Jörg Meuthen attempted to remove Höcke from the party on account of his alleged racism, but failed.^[20] This led to Meuthen ultimately quitting the party in 2022.^[21]

In November 2021, Höcke's parliamentary immunity in the Landtag of Thuringia was cancelled. He was accused of ending a speech in May 2021 with the phrase Alles für Deutschland [de] ("All/Everything for Germany"), a phrase used by the Hitlerian regime's SA paramilitary wing and whose use is illegal under insignia legislation.^[22] In June 2023, Höcke was officially indicted for this.^{[23][24][25][26]} He was indicted for an additional charge after making use of the phrase again in December 2023 during an AfD meeting in Gera.^[27] He was convicted in both instances in separate trials by the regional court of Halle in May and June 2024, and sentenced to two monetary fines totalling €29,900. Höcke appealled the judgement, but the convictions were upheld by the Federal Court of Justice in September 2025.^[28]

In the 2024 Thuringian state election, the AfD, under the leadership of Höcke, increased its vote share to a record high of 33%, and became the biggest party in the state. It is the biggest voteshare ever won by the party and the first time AfD placed first in a federal state election.^[29][30][31]

Höcke espouses far-right views.^[32] During demonstrations in autumn of 2015, Höcke called for Germany to have "not only a thousand year past", but also "a thousand year future." He would go on to describe the period of the German Reich from 1871 to 1914 as the heyday for the German People.^[33]

When Höcke was young, his family frequently discussed their expulsion from East Prussia. His grandparents instilled in him a strong sense of belonging to East Prussia, even though he had never lived there. The family obituary for Höcke’s grandmother features the coat of arms of the Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen, an organization for people displaced from East Prussia.^[34] Höcke’s speeches often reference the expulsion of Germans from East Prussia at the end of World War II, suggesting that this experience of his grandparents has influenced his views on German identity and victimhood.^[35] His father was subscribed to the antisemitic magazine Die Bauernschaft, published by prominent Holocaust denier Thies Christophersen,^[12] and supported individuals and groups with ties to far-right groups. This suggests that Höcke was exposed to right-wing ideologies from a young age.^[34]

Höcke has stated that "the big problem is that one presents Hitler as absolutely evil."^[36] He believes that Germans have been denied the right to national pride and expression due to their country's history. He has questioned the amount of time that German schools spend teaching students about Nazis. He has called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a "monument of shame,"^[37] and wants a "180-degree change in memory policy."^[38]

Höcke has used the term "Lebensraum," which was used by Nazis to refer to territorial expansion and has questioned why this phrase is denounced by the German public. He called former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s officials a “Tat-Elite," a term SS officers used to refer to themselves.^[35]

Political scientists such as Gero Neugebauer [de] and Hajo Funke [de] have commented that Höcke's opinions are close to the National Democratic Party of Germany and consider his statements völkisch, racist and fascist.^[39][40] In September 2019, a German court ruled that describing Höcke as fascist was not libelous. However, a later court ruling in 2020 ruled against the FDP politician Sebastian Czaja for stating that the court ruling had classified Höcke as a fascist.^[41] He participated in several rallies of the anti-Islam Pegida movement alongside Andreas Kalbitz in the early 2020s.^[42][43][44]

Höcke has expressed public support for the far-right ecologist magazine Die Kehre (The Turning), which has been published since 2020 in an attempt to "reclaim" environmental conservation from the left.^[45]

In April 2026 he laid out his political views for the future of Germany in a 4 ½ hour interview that went viral in Germany, gathering more than a million views in the first day it got published on YouTube.^[46]

In March 2015 the newspaper Thüringer Allgemeine used "Bernd" erroneously as Höcke's first name.^[85] After Höcke complained publicly about the incident, the heute-show, a late night satirical news program, started to systematically use "Bernd" for his first name as a running gag.^[86] Later, other comedians adopted the idea, referring to him as "Bernd," also.^[87][88] The widespread use among comedians led to reporters and anchormen of various news media erroneously using "Bernd" on several occasions.^[89][90][91] In January 2018, even an original press release of the Bundestag accidentally used "Bernd," before it was corrected on the same day.^[92][93] In December 2020, the AfD of North Rhine-Westphalia accidentally invited journalists to a party event where "Herrn [Mr.] Bernd Höcke" would be present.^[94]

In 2023, a petition was started with the intention to revoke Höcke's eligibility to run for parliament. The petition is based on article 18 of the German Constitution, which refers to the forfeiture of fundamental rights. The campaign network Campact started the petition and set the goal of collecting 1.7 million signatures to urge the German government to action. Legal scholar Gertrude Lübbe-Wolf first introduced the idea of using article 18 of the constitution to defend German democracy in a way that would be less radical than banning the whole political party (the AfD). It is now the largest German political petition to have ever existed.^[95]