The leader of Germany's right-wing populist party has indicated she may step down after an embarrassing dip in national polls. The AfD is set to select its candidate for chancellor in a few weeks' time.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/O. Killig
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The nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) may have a new face to lead it through the 2017 federal election campaign, according to media reports on Thursday. In an interview with Berlin daily "Tagesspiegel," party chief Frauke Petry hinted that she may step down from politics amidst rumors of growing discontent with her leadership.
"Neither politics nor the AfD are the only alternatives," said Petry, in a preview of a fuller profile to be published Friday. Her reasons were not, it seemed, frustration with slipping poll numbers as Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) reclaimed some of its traditional territory to the right of the center.
No, Petry said, she was simply reaching her personal and professional limits: "After more than four years in the AfD, I've expended a huge amount of energy and made a departure from my regular life."
Before helping party founder Bernd Lücke (whom the party ousted in her favor nearly two years ago) get the party off the ground in 2013, Petry was a chemist and businesswoman. After moving into politics, Petry separated from her husband and father of her four children, and has steered the party on a course of increasingly controversial national-conservatism.
Her strategy of emphasizing anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies was at first a boon to the AfD. Even in the aftermath of scandals including statements from prominent members downplaying the Holocaust, support continued to grow, and the party easily crossed the five-percent election threshold required to enter a number of new state parliaments.
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Leading members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have often made provocative, if not outright offensive, remarks — targeting refugees or evoking Nazi terminology.
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Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia first made headlines in 2017 for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. In July 2023, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by declaring that "This EU must die so that the true Europe may live." In 2019, a court ruled that it was not slanderous to describe Höcke as a fascist.
Image: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Alice Weidel
One of the best-known public faces of the AfD, party co-chair Alice Weidel rarely shies away from causing a row. Her belligerent rhetoric caused particular controversy in a Bundestag speech in 2018, when she declared, "burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state."
Image: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/picture-alliance
Maximilian Krah
Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, has called the EU a "vassal" of the US and wants to replace it with a "confederacy of fatherlands." He also wants to end support for Ukraine, and has warned on Twitter that immigration will lead to an "Umvolkung" of the German people — a Nazi-era term similar to the far-right's "great replacement" conspiracy theory.
Image: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images
Alexander Gauland
Former parliamentary party leader Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. He said Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
Image: Soeren Stache/dpa/picture-alliance
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
Harald Weyel
Not all of the AfD's scandals are about racism: Sometimes they are just revealing. Bundestag member Harald Weyel was caught in a scandal in September 2022 when a microphone he clearly didn't know was on caught him expressing his hope that Germany would suffer a "dramatic winter" of high energy prices or else "things will just go on as ever."
Image: Christoph Hardt /Future Image/imago images
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
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CDU reclaims the right
The CDU had been moving increasingly to the center over the past four years, which is partly the result of a grand coalition with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), and Merkel's refugee policy. However, as September's election approaches, the chancellor and her party have distanced themselves from the SPD, for example by backing down from the idea of introducing dual citizenship, to surprisingly swift results. In the first test of the CDU's new direction, at regional elections in the state of Saarland last Sunday, the CDU jumped five percent in poll numbers from the last election and captured the most seats in the legislature.
AfD official: Petry trying to blackmail party members
Petry insisted, however, that the anger directed at her over this defeat would not be the reason for her possible resignation. Politics should never be taken personally, or "you won't last long," she told Tagesspiegel.
Speaking to the daily later on Thursday, Petry's deputy Alexander Gauland criticized her comments as "not well thought through," and said he "didn't take it too seriously." She belongs in the party, Gauland added. One anonymous high-ranking party official was more harsh, calling it "blackmail," a clear attempt to gather support and sympathy ahead of a key party meeting.
The AfD is set to choose its candidate for chancellor at its party convention in the western city of Cologne at the end of April.
