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‘I don’t want to shower with Nazis’: FC Bundestag in crisis over AfD players

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.21-113643/https://www.ft.com/content/0d43970a-e3a6-4871-820a-18e5736f5572

The German parliament’s football team was adamant that it already had enough rightwingers. But FC Bundestag has been thrown into crisis after a Berlin court overturned a ban on members of the far-right Alternative for Germany from joining the squad. 

In a microcosm of the fraught debate about how to handle the AfD — which last month claimed a historic second-place finish in federal elections — the club must now decide how to respond to the ruling and whether to allow the far right MPs to take part in its weekly matches.

“More than 20 per cent of the population voted for us and want us to be represented in different offices in the parliament — and also in FC Bundestag,” said Malte Kaufmann, an AfD Bundestag member who campaigned against the ban. “This is an example of how opposition rights are trampled in Germany.”

‘I don’t want to shower with Nazis’: FC Bundestag in crisis over AfD playershttps://www.ft.com/content/0d43970a-e3a6-4871-820a-18e5736f5572Open linkView original on sopuli.xyz
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Comments9
einkornreply
feddit.org

In my opinion it's a "team building" effort across party lines.

14
UnexpectedBehaviorreply
lemmy.world

Same reason why my company has two badminton teams, a bicycle racing club, a boardgame and RPG community, a 3D printing slack channel, organises diving trips and participates in game jams. And so much more. Politicians probably just lack imagination for their hobbies

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adr1anreply
programming.dev

Not that the article answers this, but I found this interesting:

The team dates back to 1967, when it was founded by west German parliamentarians in the then capital of Bonn — a time when the main centre-left and centre-right parties together held more than 90 per cent of the seats. They play weekly matches against other amateur workplace teams from business, culture and civil society, as well as an annual contest against other parliamentary teams from elsewhere in Europe. Players over the years have included former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, former finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble and Joschka Fischer, the country’s first Green foreign minister. Two weeks before German reunification in 1990, the team played against members of the “People’s Chamber” of the communist east German republic.

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Haus
kbin.earth

What's the old quote? "If there are 10 people on the shower with a nazi, there are 11 nazis in the shower?"

26
jjpamsterdam
feddit.org

I understand that a court of law found that it's illegal to bar someone from joining a club they are otherwise qualified for due to their political beliefs. Nonetheless, why would the democratic members of the club in any way be accommodating for the antidemocratic ones? If it were me, I'd simply not train, play or otherwise engage with these lunatics and just pretend that they aren't around.

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‘I don’t want to shower with Nazis’: FC Bundestag in crisis over AfD players | Spyke