DHe AfD politician Roland Ulbrich has voluntarily left his party's parliamentary group in the Saxon state parliament. The state parliamentary group announced this on Wednesday in Dresden. The 61-year-old thereby avoided being excluded. Ulbrich had “seriously violated party principles,” the AfD justified its decision last Monday. In addition, the state executive committee, in coordination with the federal leadership, requested a party exclusion procedure.

A message on the website of the AfD federal association on Tuesday shows that the planned steps against Ulbrich are related to his function as vice president of the AfD's Federal Arbitration Court.

According to the announcement, Ulbrich – a lawyer by profession – resigned from this role in order to take on “responsibility for the content of an emergency decision” of the committee. This could give the impression that he “is adopting a terminology and a legal principle of National Socialism with his jurisprudence”.

ZDF reported on the decision of the Federal Arbitration Court of the AfD. This explains why an AfD politician will not have her membership rights revoked. According to ZDF, the woman of Polish origin described herself as “Aryan” on Facebook. ZDF quotes from the AfD court's ruling: “As a Slavic language, the Polish language is classified as a Slavic language and is part of the Aryan languages. It is also not clear why the term 'Aryan' is associated with the National Socialist racial ideology. In this respect, reference should only be made to the Reich Citizenship Act of September 15, 1935, which stipulates in Section 2 I that a Reich citizen is only a citizen who is of German or related blood.”

Despite this direct reference to the Nuremberg Laws, the chairman of the AfD arbitration tribunal, Gereon Bollmann, expressed his respect for Ulbirch's “convincingly justified resignation” in a press release and thanked him for the “work he had done up to that point”.