The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has voted to allow Frauke Petry to run in the September election, despite internal strife. After building up the AfD, she has become a divisive figure in the nationalist party.
Image: Reuters/W. Rattay
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The Alternative for Germany's (AfD) party congress voted on Sunday in favor of allowing national spokeswoman and leader of its Saxony branch, Frauke Petry, to run as a candidate for the state of Saxony in this year's federal elections.
A proposal to stop her from running was put forward by a wing of the AfD who accuse her of splitting party ranks. Previously, Petry refused to support two disgraced party members over comments they made concerning the Holocaust at an event in January. Her detractors also claimed that the charges of perjury against her have damaged the party's reputation.
However, at Sunday's AfD party congress in the eastern German town of Dohna, 33 delegates for the nationalist party rejected the proposal to ban her from running, while 19 voted in favor.
#GermanyDecides: A look at the AfD in Dresden
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Petry remains the top candidate on the AfD's list of candidates in Saxony for a seat in the Bundestag, giving her a very good chance of entering Germany's lower house following September's federal election.
Petry the target of anger as AfD support wanes
Petry, a trained chemist and businesswoman, entered politics to help AfD founder Bernd Lucke establish the party as a mainstream political force in 2013. Her ultra-nationalist, anti-Muslim and anti-immigration politics proved to be a boon for the AfD, with support reaching a record high of 15 percent last September.
However, the party has seen a recent slump in support in this year's state elections, thanks in no small part to a series of scandals that have plagued prominent members.
In January, AfD lawmaker Jens Maier declared that Germany's "guilt cult" about the Holocaust was over during an event hosted by the AfD's youth organization in Dresden - the sort of statement generally designed to play well with Germany's neo-Nazis.
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.
Image: Britta Pedersen/dpa/picture alliance
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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At the same conference, the AfD's leader in the eastern German state of Thuringia, Björn Höcke, called for an end to the culture of Shoah remembrance, attacking Germany's national Holocaust memorial and the country's devotion to teaching its citizens about Nazi genocide. Höcke said that German history was being made "appalling and laughable" and that "these stupid politics of coming to grips with the past cripple us - we need nothing other than a 180-degree reversal on the politics of remembrance."
Petry backed the expulsion of both Maier and Höcke from the party. Despite that, Maier was elected to the second position of the party's candidate list in Saxony for Bundestag seats. The AfD did decide to remove Höcke from the party's ranks, although an arbitration committee of the party is still scheduled to rule on that request.
