„#Merkelmussweg“ – Tweets im Wandel der Zeit. Eine schlagwort- und sprechhandlungstheoretische Analyse

Far-right anniversary politics and social media: The Alternative for Germany’s contestation of the East German past on Twitter

“…Usually reinforced by Twitter's hashtag architecture and indicated by a hashtagged version of the name of the politician under attack, AfD's commemorative attacks on Angela Merkel provide a good example of this. Paralleling far-right anti-Merkel hashtag campaigns like #Merkelmussweg (#Merkelmustgo) (see Böhm and Gätje, 2021), Merkel is targeted not only because of her East German past but also because of her policies -particularly Germany's intake of close to a million refugees primarily fleeing the Syrian Civil War in 2015 -which have been deemed by many on the right to have dragged the CDU/CSU too far left and endangered the nation. One tweet from AfD Bundestag member Petr Bystron disparaged public calls in 2018 for German Unity Day to better reflect Germans with a migration background as a call to some sort of multicultural totalitarian state referred to as 'Merkelland'.…”