Mehdi Hasan

speaker

4,624 appearances 9 recordings 7 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 9 Jul

Mehdi Hasan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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But yes, I mean, years ago, I've been presenting head to head on Al Jazeera English, I think for about

14 years now.

We launched it in 2012 with Richard Dawkins, if memory serves me correctly.

And we discussed with teams over the years, I've had discussions with producers, should we have someone on from the AFD?

And we always said, no, we don't want to platform this party too close to neo-Nazis, too far right.

Why would we do that?

We don't want to platform fascists.

But it came to a point where the AFD, whether we like it or not, are so now in the German mainstream that

are so enshrined in the political system of Germany.

They are leading in the polls, sadly.

They are leading in the polls for the Saxony-Anhalt big state election later this year.

They're the second biggest party in the Bundestag, in the German parliament.

So at what point do you say, you know what, we need to actually hold them to account, just like everyone else?

The old system of saying, well, just ignore them and hope they go away, that hasn't worked.

Now, that doesn't mean I think you should platform them everywhere and anywhere.

I don't think you should be having chummy interviews with them on breakfast TV.

But I do think if you do it, you've got to do it in a sustained, challenging, interrogatory way, which is what Head to Head was built for.

So we kind of slightly arrogantly said, OK, if anyone's going to do it, we should do it because we have a format.

a one hour sustained interview with, I have a very good research team that helped me prep very in-depth questions.

We have a panel of experts to support me.

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