AfD on culture and media

The AfD wants to preserve the skilled trades as cultural heritage. It plans a digital archive, trade weeks in schools and support for businesses that practice traditional techniques. This is meant to spark young people's interest in trade careers.

The AfD sees the skilled trades as part of culture. It wants an online archive about the history of the trades. Students should learn about trades in special weeks. Businesses that use old techniques should get help.

The archive would present the history of the trades, historic businesses and training paths. Statewide trade weeks would introduce students to techniques and occupations. Support would go to restorers, musical instrument makers and stonemasons, among others. The platform notes that some occupations and techniques are dying out and that their knowledge has cultural value.

The AfD wants to adjust funding for historic buildings to actual need, better protect museum pieces against theft, and strengthen arts education. The platform justifies this with regional identity and preserving historical heritage for future generations.

The AfD wants to keep old buildings. There should be suitable funding for this. Museums should protect their valuable pieces better from thieves. Children should keep having music and art at school.

The aim is to preserve buildings that shape townscapes and regional culture, such as the Eifel longhouse or the courtyard farms of the Palatinate and Rhenish Hesse. Important museum pieces would be secured with protective technology that is regularly updated; the platform points to the attempted theft of the Trier gold coin hoard in 2019. The AfD rejects cuts to music and art lessons in the school timetable. Funding for music schools would rise so that parents' income does not decide access.

The AfD wants to give permanent funding to the state chapter of the Bund der Vertriebenen (Federation of Expellees) and provide more money for cultural heritage from Germany's former eastern territories. A meeting center would be built for ethnic German resettlers. The platform argues the state has neglected its legal duty to preserve this heritage.

The AfD wants to care for the culture of expellees. Expellees are Germans who had to leave their homes in the east after the war. Their association in the state would get steady money. Ethnic Germans from Russia and other countries would get a meeting place.

Instead of granting money only on application, the state chapter of the BdV would receive institutional funding. Teachers would be offered training on the history and culture of Germans from Eastern Europe. Through the Bundesrat, the AfD wants the federal institute for culture and history in Eastern Europe to regain the words "of the Germans" that were dropped from its name in 2023. The planned meeting center would let resettlers maintain their cultural heritage and inform visitors about former German settlement areas.

The AfD wants to scrap the Rundfunkbeitrag (household broadcasting fee) and terminate the interstate broadcasting treaties. Today's public broadcasters are to be replaced by a slimmed-down "Grundfunk" (basic broadcaster) limited to information, education and culture. It is to be paid for by a levy on the revenues of large internet companies.

The AfD wants to end the broadcasting fee. The public TV and radio stations should become much smaller. The new service is called Grundfunk. It should only offer news, education and culture. Big internet companies should pay for it.

According to the platform, the fee is €18.36 a month and raises more than eight billion euros a year. The AfD does not intend to approve new interstate broadcasting treaties. An information and culture levy is to apply to revenues that companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix earn from online advertising and online distribution of entertainment. Expensive entertainment shows are to be left to private broadcasters, while regional content is part of the basic broadcaster. The AfD argues that today's broadcasters fail to meet their mandate of neutral information and are politically one-sided.

The AfD wants to cap the salaries of directors general at public broadcasters and of directors at public theaters and tie them to public-sector pay scales. In addition, the number of broadcasting oversight bodies is to be cut and the broadcasters' administration simplified.

The heads of broadcasters and theaters earn a lot. The AfD wants to limit these salaries. They should earn what public employees earn. The broadcasters should have fewer boards. A board is a group that advises or decides.

According to the platform, these directors are paid outside the collective pay scale and usually receive several hundred thousand euros a year. The AfD considers this excessive because the institutions are funded by fees or taxes and bear no business risk. Pay for other senior managers, such as broadcasting directors, is also to fall. In the AfD's view, fee payers should be represented more fairly on the broadcasters' boards. Cutting boards and bureaucracy is meant to save costs and improve oversight.