00:03Is Brussels trying to freeze EU funds to a German state
00:07that voted for the far-right Alternative for Germany party
00:10in an election in early September?
00:12That's what several posts are saying online,
00:15many with thousands of views, likes and shares,
00:17and often with a picture of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen attached.
00:21They allege that millions and sometimes even billions of euros
00:25could be withheld from the state of Saxony-Anhalt,
00:27located in east-central Germany,
00:30after it handed the AfD a landslide victory on 6th September.
00:34However, the 39 seats it won were not enough to command a majority,
00:38even though it got more than twice as many as any other party.
00:42It's since struggled to establish a coalition, however,
00:45as the other parties have refused to collaborate with it.
00:48Von der Leyen herself has repeatedly criticized the AfD in the past,
00:51and her own centre-right CDU party suffered a crushing defeat,
00:55possibly fueling the suggestions online that she's behind the scheme to freeze the EU funds.
01:01However, there's no evidence that that's the case.
01:04Instead, the narrative seems to stem from a statement by Green MEP Daniel Freund,
01:09who said after the state election that it pushed to freeze EU money flowing to an AfD-led government
01:14if they violated any European values or misused funds.
01:18Saxony-Anhalt is billed to receive 2.95 billion euros in EU funding
01:24as part of the current 2021-2027 budget.
01:28Freund highlighted that the EU had used similar freezing measures in the past in Poland and Hungary.
01:33Brussels did indeed block money intended for those countries a few years ago,
01:37over all of law and democratic backsliding concerns under previous governments.
01:43Some of them have since been released following reforms.
01:45Nevertheless, for now, the idea that this could happen to Saxony-Anhalt
01:49appears to be the opinion of a few MEPs, rather than a concerted effort by Brussels.
