AfD mayoral candidate Joachim Paul denied his right to run for office because he likes Tolkien and criticises migrants

Joachim Paul has a pronounced Tom Homan physiognomy.

On 21 September 2025, Ludwigshafen will elect a new mayor. Among the hopeful candidates was Joachim Paul, who is a member of the evil fascist Nazi Hitler party known as Alternative für Deutschland. His candidacy represented a grave threat to democracy, because if Paul were permitted to run, it would be possible to vote for him, and were enough people to vote for him, the good citizens of Ludwigshafen would find themselves in 1933 all over again.

Understandably terrified about this eventuality, the sitting mayor of Ludwigshafen, Jutta Steinruck (a former Social Democrat) wrote an email on 18 July to the state Interior Ministry of her concern that “Paul is not loyal to the constitution.” The Interior Ministry, under the control of Michael Ebling (SPD), responded with an eleven-page letter on 29 July, detailing various evidence that domestic spies in the state Office for the Protection of the Constitution had compiled on Paul. Exactly a week later, the Ludwigshafen election committee, which is chaired by Steinruck herself, formally excluded Paul from the election on the basis of his anti-constitutional tendencies. In this way, Steinruck and her collaborators succeeded in suspending their democracy for the purposes of safeguarding their democracy against the political opposition.

The Interior Ministry letter was leaked to NiUS, who have published it in its entirety. It outlines sixteen separate points of evidence that are alleged to demonstrate Paul’s political unreliability. The whole thing is what a Stasi surveillance report would look like, if the Stasi were too lazy to actually spy on people and spent all their time googling instead. It is one of the most amazing things I’ve read in a long time.

The Constitutional Protectors consider Paul to be an anti-constitutional threat to democracy who should be deprived of his right to run for office primarily because he has expressed sympathy for the ideas of some Identitarian activists and because he has written various articles for the Austrian magazine Freilich (to which I also subscribe). They’re right-wing and so very dangerous.

As particularly suspect, they single out a piece Paul wrote in 2022 on the Amazon series Rings of Power, where he wrote that Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy “reflects a conservative mindset” because its protagonists “fight for a cause greater than themselves: their homeland, the survival of their culture, a just order, the defence against a global threat.” Being the wrong kind of Tolkien fan is enough to get you stripped of your passive electoral rights in current-day Germany.

The Constitutional Protectors are similarly very uptight that Paul once offered a “video seminar” on the Nibelungenlied for the right-wing GegenUni digital platform, and what is worse, that he wrote three whole articles on the saga of the Nibelungs:

Paul criticised the state government of Rhineland-Pfalz for not making an effort … to promote itself in connection with the remake of the Nibelungen saga, which is being filmed in Rhineland-Pfalz … For him, the film is of great import for national pride. He described the film as “the story of great men and women who do what must be done because they want to remain true to their values and thus to themselves. No matter what life throws at them. Even and especially when their own lives are at stake.” This was one of three articles Joachim Paul wrote about the Nibelungen saga in 2024.

Even reverence for Germany’s greatest historical literary monuments and legends is now evidence of anti-constitutional tendencies.

The Constitutional Protectors also really, really don’t like pieces Paul has written for Freilich in which he criticises mass migration and the parallel societies that migrants construct in Germany. They complain that “Paul … has made it clear that cultural differences, such as a lack of education among migrants, are the main factors leading to more violence.”

Even worse, Paul stands accused of using quotation marks anti-constitutionally:

Another article by Joachim Paul was published on 29 June 2023 in Freilich magazine. Under the title “Why are we doing this to ourselves? On the road in Ludwigshafen’s Hemshof,” Joachim Paul reported on his impressions of the Ludwigshafen-Hemshof district. He argued that the miserable conditions in the district were primarily due to the high proportion of residents with a migrant background and that the majority of these people were financially dependent on the state … Germans are said to hardly live in the district anymore, after Italians and Greeks settled there and were eventually displaced by Turks, Arabs and “Bulgarians.” By putting “Bulgarians” in quotation marks in his text, he disparages the Bulgarian population and denies their nationality by alluding to their possible ethnic affiliation (Sinti and Roma).

The Constitutional Protectors harbour the dark suspicion that Paul “has … connections to [Martin] Sellner,” the Austrian Identitarian activist, and note that Sellner once gave a talk in the very same building where Paul has his office.

Then there’s the bit where they accuse Paul of throwing meme white nationalist gang signs:

Joachim Paul is alleged to have made the so-called white power salute at an AfD event. The white power salute is similar to the gesture used to mean “everything’s okay.” It involves forming a circle with the thumb and index finger and spreading the other three fingers apart. The letters ‘W’ and ‘P’ can be seen in this gesture. The expression is used in the right-wing extremist scene to emphasise the power and supremacy of white people.

Other evidence of Paul’s political unreliability includes the fact that he once “invited people to a book fair” where a “Chemnitz-based second-hand bookshop … exhibited various right-wing literature”; that he has occasionally collaborated with Compact magazine (the publication illegally banned by former Interior Minister Nancy Faeser); that he may have helped provide a venue to “the nationalist women’s group ‘Lukreta’” for a forum on International Women’s Day; and that he recently held a meeting to promote this year’s Stolzmonat.

This particular seedy exercise in ensuring that voters may only choose among various pre-approved candidates is much bigger than this local mayoral race. The SPD-led Interior Ministry of Rheinland-Pfalz, the Constitutional Protectors and the mayor of Ludwigshafen joined forces here to trial a new tactic for keeping AfD candidates out of office. It is not inconceivable that we will see the same method used against other AfD politicians in the future. Paul has pledged to challenge the election committee’s decision to exclude his candidacy. As their actions were clearly illegal, chances are high that a court will sooner or later find in his favour. By then, however, the Ludwigshafen election will be over with; the damage will have been done.

UPDATE: Contrary to what I originally wrote, Paul did not obviously praise the Rings of Power, he merely wrote a piece related to the release of the Amazon series, in which he praised Tolkien. I know next to nothing about Tolkien or the Rings of Power, and I did not know the latter was so loathed. I regret slandering Paul in this way. I have corrected the piece.