The State parliament of the German city of Hamburg has unanimously voted to strip MP Olga Petersen of her membership.
The move on December 18 marked the first time since 1945 that a Hamburg MP had been ousted by their peers.
Petersen joined the parliament, the so-called Bürgerschaft, for the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in 2020.
The 42-year-old mother of four was born in the Russian city of Omsk and moved to Germany at the age of 16. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she became notorious for her pro-Russian stance.
The vote in favour of ousting her was unanimous, including another AfD MP. Reportedly, Petersen has not taken part in the sessions of the Bürgerschaft for several months. She never showed up in the Hamburg district parliament of Hamburg to which she had been elected in June 2024.
According to December 18 media reports, Petersen moved from Germany to Russia with her children in May 2024. She reportedly fled Germany after her children’s school had alerted family services over “conspicuous behaviour”.
After she had not been seen in parliament for some time, a State officer initiated a search for her.
Petersen’s apartment was allegedly found unoccupied and her lawyer could not get in touch with her. As a result, the city’s registration office determined that, as of September 1, she was no longer a legal resident of Hamburg.
In October, a picture of Petersen giving a speech in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg against sanctions on Moscow surfaced in Russian media.
The loss of her legal residence in Hamburg meant that the State parliament could decide on whether to exclude Petersen from its ranks.
In a similar case in 2009, a leftist party requested Green MP Siegfried Diebolder be ousted from parliament, alleging that he did not reside in Hamburg any more but in neighbouring Schleswig-Holstein.
Due to her exclusion, Petersen will no longer receive around €5,500 in monthly parliamentary allowances.
In May 2024, she had already been excluded from the AfD’s parliamentary group. The party also initiated a procedure to exclude her from the AfD altogether.
Petersen had angered her AfD colleagues by giving an interview on Russian State TV while supposedly in Russia for personal reasons.
Brussels Signal contacted both Petersen and the AfD in Hamburg for comment but had not received such at the time of writing.
