Boris Palmer's story is also good for seeing what happens to those who deviate from the mainstream and party directives in the Western world of liberal democracy.
"Beyond the Green Border". This was the title of the lecture announced for September 5 by the Hungarian-German Institute of the MCC. Is the limit small green or big green? We Hungarians immediately think of the lowercase green border, border areas not protected by fences or guards, through which uncontrolled migration is recently trying to pass towards the interior of Europe. The lowercase green border is the official version of the folk expression tökön-pasuzulyon. Capitalized Green is a party name or ideological commitment that is not used in our country, although if you look at the domestic political palette, at least 3-4 micro-parties receive international support under the title of Green Party.
At the MCC event, the uppercase Green applies, as the invited guest is Boris Palmer, the mayor of Tübingen, a smaller-than-average German city.
Ever since Palmer entered politics, he was considered a stable man for the Greens.
Well, not from the classic 68 generation, he wasn't even around then. He is from the intermediate green generation, which not only sniffed here and there around the universities, but also wore the benches. He is, for example, the famous university of Tübingen, where he also earned a degree.
He was not even thirty when he entered the provincial parliament in the colors of the party, and in 2007 he was elected mayor of Tübingen.
From the beginning, there were problems with him, because he was deviant, independent, did not follow the directives of the party in many things, and was not even willing to practice self-criticism.
The public only saw from this that the brat Palmer again said or did something that pleased the university citizens of Tübingen. And they make up thirty percent of the city's total population and more than half of the voters.
Perhaps no one thought that the party would list Palmer's missteps, and then when he crossed that particular Green border, they would launch an investigation against him.
This occurred roughly towards the end of his second term, so he completed his third term (from 2022) as an independent candidate, losing ten percentage points in popularity, but the votes were still enough for an absolute majority.
Palmer's expressions paint the picture of a party member "who gradually deviates more and more from the direction of his own party and increasingly opposes its basic values", the lawyer of the Greens summarized Palmer's crimes in his motion for disqualification. I would like to highlight just a few of the criminal records so that we can see the mistakes that have been made. These may be familiar to us, whether we are thinking of the list prepared for the exclusion of Ernő Nemecsek of the Pál utca putty association, or of the crimes of the 1950s, when communist defectors were slaughtered.
For example, Palmer once said that
it is frivolous to deal with questions like how to name a sweet.
If it's called niggers, that's what it's called. Period. However, the negro kiss was turned into a chocolate kiss elsewhere by political correctness, and in our country - due to lack of political correctness - its production was even stopped. Later, already during the great wave of migration, in an interview, Palmer demanded law-abiding behavior from asylum seekers, in his opinion that not everyone is entitled to asylum anyway.
In addition, he stated that the external borders of the European Union should be closed by force if necessary.
All of these violated not only the basic principles of the party, but also the Basic Law, according to the Greens. During covid, he opened the city's entertainment venues, where a quick test was enough to enter.
The "Tübingen model" overriding the central directive stepped into the federal value system of social solidarity.
I won't list Palmer's crimes any further, even though there are one or two more juicy ones that the press doesn't even dare to name.
The possibility of exclusion had been hovering over Palmer's head for some time, but he did not get away with it, and he repeatedly violated the Green community principles with a comment that was considered anti-Semitic. If anyone, he could do it, at least in our country, since his grandfather, Siegfried Kilsheimer, was a Jew who had to flee to the United States from Nazi Germany in 1938.
After his anti-Semitic statement, however, he thought it best to voluntarily leave this colorful world-savior-world-alien putty society.
Don't add to the problem! said the guardsman to the gypsy when he caught him reading the Torah. At least according to the Hungarian racist joke. We can afford such jokes, but Boris Palmer, an independent German city manager, does not even want to go and perform wherever he is invited. In this case, to Budapest, to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium.
When the case was revealed, the entire German press and his political opponents opened fire on the mayor.
"A right-wing think tank financed by Orbán bought the independent (!) Palmer! The MCC represents anti-refugee and homophobic values, instead of developing humanity and solidarity and common solutions, they want to divide Europe. With his performance in Hungary, the mayor of Tübingen is pleasing the far right." This is how anti-Hungarian sentiments swirl in the German press.
Palmer explains, no, he will not meet the Hungarian Prime Minister. His three-day trip to Hungary serves the exchange of partnership ideas and dialogue, for example strengthening the sister-city relationship between Unterjesingen in Tübingen and Iklad in Pest County. But no one denies that he is actually looking for the political family that would accept him.
Palmer explains that, after receiving the invitation, he sought the expert opinion of a renowned professor from Tübingen about the inviting party, and the professor recommended that he accept it.
Now the professor also explains himself because he confused the Mathias Corvinus Collegium with the Corvinus University.
I don't know which is more embarrassing, this current mea culpa, or the confusion between the two institutions. Because it can be seen from the latter how thorough knowledge even the competent Germans have about the conditions in Hungary.
Boris Palmer's story is also a good way to see what opinion formation and freedom of independent decision are like in the Western world of liberal democracy, what happens to those who deviate from the mainstream and party directives, how character assassination works. All of this is déjà vu for us, because it bears an eerie resemblance to the world that we, here on the eastern side of Europe, once bitterly experienced.
The author is a historian
Source: Magyar Hírlap
Cover photo: Boris Palmer Facebook
