What Are The Chances 6 AfD Candidates Die Before An Election?

Here’s the tweet (translated) from the AfD official channel:

Sechs tote AfD-Politiker im NRW-Wahlkampf!

Four deaths had already been confirmed. Now, according to current reports from Welt, two more have become known: René Herford (kidney failure after liver disease) and Patrick Tietze (suicide). Thus, the number of deceased AfD candidates in the NRW election campainn rises to six.. The accumulation right in the middle of the election campaign raises questions:

Is everything really above board here?

AfD is of course the Reality-leaning party in Germany, which has seen no end of grief in its battles with the regime’s Fantasy-based parties. For instance, you will have heard that during this election the other parties all signed a pledge to say only nice warm sparkly things about the millions of foreigners Germany is inviting into its country. Which is a Fantasy a move as you can make. Akin to Colorado’s new law to force businesses to use whatever pronouns customers demand.

https://wmbriggs.substack.com/p/the-closer-to-reality-the-closer

Long-time readers recall Fantasists try to create Reality through spoken word, using forms of magic. Which of course they do not call magic but yet believe it. The idea is if you insist everybody says all migrants are only good, then Reality transforms (a good pun, used in another similar context) such that all migrants become only good.

Now, the timing of these deaths is seen by some as suspicious. Six deaths so close to an election for the hated party is unusual, some say. What are the chances?

In all these calculations you must always remember that improbability is a matter of perspective. It is always relative. Take a blade of grass on a golf course. Single one out, I mean, using some blind algorithm. How many are there? I saw one estimate of 80 billion, which is close enough. Using that information, the chance your ball lands on the single blade, picked in advance, is 1 in 80 billion. Small!

But you cannot conclude any occult force or guiding energy that operated inside the golf ball that brought it to that blade. That would be silly. The small probability does not prove that possible cause. (If you see this is silly, be sure to check in on my Thursday Class, which uses that silliness as the basis of “statistical significance”, which is why so much of science is so bad.)

Same with the AfD deaths. If we find that the chance of 6 deaths is small, that in itself is no proof of anything. It does not prove that the regime killed one, several, or all or none of them.

For that is the main proposition of interest: That the regime killed these 6 to disrupt the election and cause the AfD to loose the elections.

However the people died, the elections will be disrupted, since (it seems) ballots with the deceaseds’ names have to removed and replaced, and other technicalities about which I claim zero knowledge, but which are reported here. Because the way Germany’s government works, simple numbers in party representation aren’t sufficient to take command, because other parties can form coalitions and what not.

Which means the motive to kill might not be as strong as you’d think, because forming coalitions is less risky than bloodshed. Incidentally, 16 year olds can vote in these North Rhineland-Wesphalia elections, as can some foreigners. As can—get this—Ukrainian citizens. Germany is some deep kimchi.

Passing by all that, the chances of a German aged 30 to 60 or so dying in a year are roughly 4 in 1,000. That’s a rough average. That number goes up mighty fast after age 60. Being lazy, I did not look up the ages of those who died.

The chance that 6 die depends on the population we’re considering. There are, I believe, some 195 seats up for grabs, or were in 2022. But there are any number of district council seats, dog catcher and the like, which brings the total to 22,000 elections or so, most (it seems) of little consequence.

I’m not sure which exact elections the 6 dead people were vying for. One of the 195 seats, or any of the 22,000 myriad positions. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter much: we can do both.

UPDATE: I wrote this post before seeing Eugyppius’s similar entry yesterday. He, being German and knowing much more about all this, has a superior denominator of 393 municipalities with elections, whereas I originally used 195 (higher level) seats that I got from Wokepedia. I only counted candidates for the 7 major parties, whereas E has as many as 90,000 folks running for the various positions. I’m updating my numbers to include the 393 number.

The chance of 6 politicians out of 195 dying in a year (given our information) is 0.00014. The chance of 6 politicians out of 393 dying in a year (given our information) is 0.004.

The chance of 6 politicians out of 22,000 dying in a year (given our information) is 10^-30 (a very small number because it’s more likely about 88 people in that much larger group would die in a year).

That’s death from all the usual causes except being murdered by the regime, that is. If the regime killed them, then the probability these 6 died is 1 (100%!). That’s a key point.

Now there are lots of parties in Germany, with 7 main ones. I presume all 7 parties will be vying for the same 195 (or 22K, or 393) seats. I did quick search on the number of German politicians turning up dead, by party, in 2025:

I haven’t any idea how accurate this is, nor do I know how many of these applied just for the NRW election. We do not even know if all deaths were recorded, for any party. These are only the ones that were noticed by the press. That is, we don’t know which denominator we’re working with, as it were. Did they track every possible politician for every possible election (the larger 22,000?). Or is this only for the larger seats?

The AfD total is low, since the two additions bringing the total to 6 came on Monday. At any rate, the other totals are 1, 2, and 3.

Per party, the chance of 1, 2, and 3 politicians out of 195 dying in a year is 0.36, 0.14, 0.036. Out of 393 it is 0.33, 0.26, and 0.13. None of which are strikingly unlikely. But, again, I don’t know if that applies the NRW per se. There may be no other politicians from the other parties that died; the chance of 0 deaths per 195 people is 0.47, and for 393 is 0.21.

We can get nicer about this, taking into account all parties, considering more years, and so forth, but that’s enough, I think, without more precise information. It seems the 6 dead in the AfD are unusual, at least compared to ordinary number of deaths from non-regime causes.

Remember: this is not proof in and of itself the regime whacked any of them. For that, we need to bring in other evidence.

So let’s look at a crude Bayesian calculation for these numbers, mostly as an exercise to show you just how crude it is, and to prove to you that, since these kinds of calculations apply to probability any and everywhere, including scientific results, you should be a lot less trusting of science.

We want Pr(Kill|XE) which is the probability the regime killed all 6, given we saw the bodies (X), and whatever background information we bring to the problem (E). Bayes is this formula (right out of the textbook):

Pr(Kill | XE) = Pr(X|Kill E) Pr(Kill|E) /(Pr(X|Kill E) Pr(Kill|E) + Pr(X|Not Kill E) Pr(Not Kill|E) )

Given the regime whacked the 6, then Pr(X|Kill E) = 1, which makes calculations easy. We above calculated that given that all died of other non-nefarious causes Pr(X|Not Kill E) = 0.00014 or 0.004, depending on the number of seats we’re considering. We can start with these for illustration. All that’s left is to specify our assessment of the probability the regime turns murderous before we learn (or consider) the bodies, which is Pr(Kill| E).

For fun, let’s start with 0.01, or 1 in a 100. I think that’s way too high, but we can tweak it after. That gives us Pr(Not Kill|E) = 1 – Pr(Kill|E) = 0.99. Then calculate for 195 seats:

Pr(Kill | XE) = (1 * 0.01) /(1 * 0.01 + 0.00014 * 0.99 ) = 0.986.

For 393 seats:

Pr(Kill | XE) = (1 * 0.01) /(1 * 0.01 + 0.004 * 0.99 ) = 0.72.

Which means we give almost a 99% chance the regime racked up the bodies (for 195 seats). Which is, I think, way too high. Maybe the fix is in Pr(Kill| E). Let’s make that 1 in 1,000 instead of 1 in 100. Then we get Pr(Kill | XE) = 0.88 (or 0.2 for 393 seats). Still too high.

How about 1 in a million? Then we get Pr(Kill | XE) = 0.007 for 195 seats or Which means we moved from 1 in a million to about 7 in a thousand. Our belief increased by 1,000 times. Yet for 393 seats, we get 0.0002, which is still moving up from 1 in a million to 2 in ten thousand.

But let’s think. What about, say, the CDU, which had 3 dead bodies, which from non-regime murders had a chance of 0.036. Let’s put that in and see what we get. With 195 seats and Pr(Kill|E) = 0.01 (now repurposed to give our assessment of the chance the regime whacked the CDU politicians), we get Pr(Kill|XE) = 0.22. And similar for 393 seats.

Which means we’d have to believe there’s a 22% the regime killed all 3 of the CDU politicians! (Out of the 195 candidates.) If we slavishly follow the math, that is. But why should Pr(Kill|E) be so high? Why would the regime want to kill their own? Well, maybe they thought they’d all turn traitor and embrace Reality. Put in Pr(Kill|E) = 1 in a million. Then we get Pr(Kill|XE) = 0.000027 for 195 seats. Well, that’s still a lot more than 1 in a million.

Yet none of these are that believable. All are centered around supposing the regime killed all a party’s dead members. Maybe some of them died naturally. It happens, even in corrupt regimes like Germany’s.

So suppose the regime only killed 1 AfD member, whichever is the most important one in the election calculus. Set our Pr(Kill|E) again at 1 in 100, which I still say is high. Then for 195 seats we get Pr(Kill|XE) = 0.027. Now that is not that exciting a number, is it?

If we think instead the regime killed only the last two, then with Pr(Kill|E) = 0.01 we get Pr(Kill|XE) = 0.067. With Pr(Kill|E) = 1 in a million we get Pr(Kill|XE) = 0.07.

It all hinges on how many AfD pols we think the regime whacked and what we bring to that in Pr(Kill|E).

Which is to say, what you bring to Pr(Kill|E). Opinions differs, thus so does probability. This is a feature and not a bug.

Video for those who prefer (poor quality).

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