Germany's Alternative for Germany (AfD) party reelected Tino Chrupalla as party leader during a conference in the eastern state of Saxony on Saturday.

The 47-year-old fended off his slightly more moderate rival, Norbert Kleinwächter, gaining some 53.5% of the vote.

After his reelection, Chrupalla proposed the co-leader of the AfD's parliamentary party, Alice Weidel, as party co-leader. She was then voted in, receiving 67.3% of the vote.

The two were the party's lead candidates at the last national elections in September 2021, when the party slipped to 10.3% of the popular vote from 12.6% in 2017, losing 11 seats.

'Underhand' attacks

In his candidacy speech to delegates, Chrupalla claimed that factions within the party were attempting to silence him through "underhand" attacks.

"I am the federal spokesman for the grassroots, and if I am attacked, it is only because the grassroots are to be silenced," he said. "I will not allow that."

"Voters will not give their vote to a party that presents an image of dissension," he said, calling for a focus on stability.

His opponent, Kleinwächter, had campaigned for a separation of party and parliamentary group chairmanships, and a more professional image.

Chrupalla has led the party since November 2019.

'Cultivated' debate

In her candidacy speech, Weidel, 43, called for the party to gain more recognition as an opposition force.

"Taking a soft-line approach won't be enough to achieve that," she said.

Weidel has largely focused on what she sees as a decline in security in Germany, claiming that this has been caused by insufficiently controlled immigration.

In a reference to past rifts within the party, she called on fellow members to "stop baseless accusations in public," saying the AfD needed a "cultivated discussion and debate culture."

The AfD, which has shifted ever more to the right since its beginnings as a euroskeptic party in 2013, has suffered increasingly poor results in federal and state elections as the public focus in Germany has moved away from the topic of immigration.

Extreme right flank declines to seek leadership

Another of the AfD's more influential politicians, and arguably its most extreme, Björn Höcke, did not seek the national leadership position. He endorsed Chrupalla instead. The head of the state branch of the party in Thuringia in the east enjoys quite considerable support within the party, but his extreme stances are unlikely to attract more moderate voters in western states where the AfD's influence is already more limited and shrinking.

The AfD failed to clear the 5% hurdle required for parliamentary representation in state elections in Schleswig Holstein in May, and only scraped in with 5.2% of the vote in Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, later that month. 

The party's comparatively ambivalent position on the conflict in Ukraine, opposing German weapons exports, appears to be one of the factors contributing to the decline, as well as its heavily skeptical stance on the COVID pandemic. 

tj/msh (AFP, dpa, Reuters)