Not likely to really help turn Germany around.

She Says ‘Never Again’ Is Dead. She Could Be Germany’s Next President

… Aigner, meanwhile, turned down an invitation to meet with the AfD after Beatrix von Storch, a deputy chair of its parliamentary group, mocked her on X. “What qualifies Ilse Aigner to be Germany’s president? 1. She’s a woman. 2. Soder wants her out of Bavaria. 3. She’s left-wing enough for the Social Democrats to vote for her, too. That’s how Germany decides who holds the country’s highest office. It’s a disgrace.”

The refusal reflects a confrontation with the far right that predates her presidential candidacy. Aigner has called the AfD “an enemy of our democratic system,” and on July 24, 2025, she used her authority as president of the Bavarian parliament to cut short a speech by its parliamentary group leader, Katrin Ebner-Steiner.

Ebner-Steiner blamed people with a migrant background for most knife attacks in Germany and claimed that “the centers of many cities are now defined by doner shops, barbershops, hookah shops and Arab grocers.”

Aigner repeatedly warned that the remarks broke with the tradition of conciliatory speeches before the summer recess. When Ebner-Steiner continued, Aigner switched off her microphone. “All right, colleague, I’m putting an end to this now,” she said.

Aigner’s opposition to the AfD has not prevented her from taking hard-line positions on immigration and Islam. At the height of the refugee crisis in 2015, she called for cutting support to a minimum for asylum seekers with no legal right to stay in Germany.

That same year, she called for banning the burqa and niqab in public, including for tourists from Arab countries, arguing that covering one’s face “doesn’t fit our culture.” In 2018, she defended then-Interior Minister Horst Seehofer’s assertion that Islam was not part of Germany.

‘Never again’ under threat

Aigner’s statements on antisemitism also combine a defense of Jewish life with criticism of integration failures and of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

At a rally on October 5, 2025, calling for the release of the hostages, she said: “For all our solidarity, we can no longer condone what is happening in Gaza. It’s terrible.”

At the same rally, she argued that Germany had not done enough to integrate “people from Muslim backgrounds whose hatred of Jews is stoked from outside Germany” into its liberal values.

Her recent appearance at Ohel Jakob brought those concerns into the first hours of her presidential candidacy. The woman Germany’s political center hopes will unite the country was warning that Germany had failed to deliver on one of its defining postwar commitments.

For now, her supporters have found someone the parties of Germany’s political center can agree on. Whether she can reach the voters turning away from those parties is a different question.