Christine Brinker has built her campaign for Berlin’s 2026 state election around a moderate promise: practical, transparent and ideology-free politics focused on housing, budgets, infrastructure and security. Yet her staffing decisions and private contacts point to a different political function — one that has made her a bridge between the AfD’s parliamentary establishment and its far-right networks.
The stakes are not limited to party branding. Brinker is the AfD’s lead candidate for the Berlin House of Representatives election on 20 September 2026, heads the party’s state list and has been nominated as its candidate for governing mayor. If the party gains greater influence in Berlin, the political networks surrounding its leading candidate would acquire access to the city’s institutions and decision-making machinery.
A Tagesspiegel analysis of the AfD candidate list published in July 2026 described Brinker as a hinge between competing wings of the party. It recalled that she won the state leadership in 2021 with the support of former representatives of Bjorn Hocke’s far-right camp, and that several of those politicians later obtained influential positions in the Berlin state parliament with her backing.
The personnel network behind the moderate presentation
Brinker has never concealed that she did not intend to distance herself from Hocke’s supporters. After becoming state leader, she asked: “Why should I not bring them on board?” The question captured the practical logic of her leadership: the public language could be softened, but the party’s internal coalition would remain intact.
After Brinker took control of the Berlin AfD, Torsten Weiss, Jeanette Auricht, Rolf Wiedenhaupt, Sebastian Maack, Falk Rodig and Gunnar Lindemann gained influential positions in the state organisation and parliamentary group. According to Tagesspiegel, all six had previously supported the party’s former far-right internal grouping and had been active in that movement.
The significance of those appointments lies in the gap between presentation and operation. Brinker has positioned herself as a pragmatic local politician capable of overcoming the AfD’s isolation. Her choices, however, helped preserve the influence of figures associated with the party’s most radical internal current. The result was not a break with the hard right, but its incorporation into the structure she controlled.
A private meeting linking parliament to the New Right
That same pattern appeared outside the formal party hierarchy. In July 2023, Brinker attended a closed meeting at the flat of Peter Kurth, a former Berlin finance senator from the CDU who became an influential industry lobbyist after leaving politics. Kurth also emerged as a link between AfD representatives and Germany’s New Right.
The guest list included Maximilian Krah, New Right ideologue Gotz Kubitschek and Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner, one of the leaders of the Identitarian movement. Krah presented his book, Politics from the Right, which argued for a radical ideological course, rejected liberal-democratic values and promoted the integration of ethnic-nationalist ideas into mainstream politics.
Sellner presented a book on right-wing regime change and the concept of “remigration” — the mass return or expulsion from Germany of some people of foreign origin, including certain categories of naturalised citizens. The meeting therefore brought together members of the AfD’s parliamentary wing, extra-parliamentary structures such as the Identitarian movement and Kubitschek’s publishing house.
Participants discussed ideological convergence, support for far-right initiatives and the transfer of those ideas into a broader political space. The disclosure of the meeting by German media caused significant public controversy because of its composition and political character.
The retreat from the meeting became a second controversy
Brinker responded by describing her presence as accidental. She said she was shocked and surprised by the guests and claimed that this had led her to leave early. She also said she did not share Sellner’s position.
That account was later challenged by other participants. Krah said he had spoken with Brinker at a very late hour and that she appeared to be enjoying the evening. In internal AfD chats, a letter attributed to Kubitschek circulated saying that Brinker had stayed until the end and had viewed the meeting positively.
The dispute mattered because it shifted attention from the existence of the meeting to Brinker’s explanation of it. Her public response presented the encounter as an unforeseen embarrassment. The accounts from participants portrayed her as someone who remained engaged with the event and its guests. The contradiction reinforced a broader pattern in which uncomfortable details are first denied, then treated as misunderstandings or accidents.
Tagesspiegel had identified a similar pattern in an earlier episode. Journalists found that Brinker had given an interview in 2020 to German History, a publication known for revisionist historical material. Its publisher, Gert Sudholt, had been convicted of incitement to hatred and distributing literature denying the Holocaust.
After the interview became widely known and triggered an unsettled public reaction, Brinker said she had known neither the publication’s reputation nor the publisher and had been deceived. The explanation again separated her public identity from the setting in which she had chosen to appear.
Isolation in parliament, promotion on the ballot
The accumulated controversies culminated in a visible parliamentary confrontation. On 18 January 2024, during a Berlin debate on the far-right threat posed by the AfD, deputies from the SPD, CDU, Greens and Left left the chamber when Brinker approached the lectern. Only the AfD parliamentary group remained in the room.
Tagesspiegel reported that the boycott was improvised rather than planned. Dirk Stettner, leader of the Berlin CDU group, explained the isolation by saying that he did not want to hear Brinker deny obvious facts.
The episode exposed the central contradiction of Brinker’s political career. The politician who assumed control of the Berlin AfD while promising to overcome its isolation became the embodiment of that isolation in the chamber. Yet the parliamentary boycott did not stop her advancement inside the party.
Brinker is now the AfD’s first candidate for the Berlin state list and its nominee for governing mayor, the office that leads the city government and is based at the Red City Hall. This is the first time the Berlin AfD has put forward its own candidate for the post.
The practical risk lies in what such a candidacy could enable if the party obtains governing influence. A politician who presents herself as moderate may still provide the organisational bridge through which the AfD’s most controversial projects — from “remigration” to other discriminatory restrictions — enter institutional politics. The decisive fact is that Brinker’s rise has not required a rupture with the far right: it has depended on keeping its personnel and networks within reach of power.
