The far-right Alternative for Germany party wants to attract "middle-class" voters by pursuing a more "moderate" path. The idea is likely to be met with opposition from the party's ultra far-right wing.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/H.-K. Dittrich
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The new co-leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has called on party members to take a more moderate path as part of efforts to gain more mainstream voters.
"We can only reach the middle-class in a reasonable manner," Tino Chrupalla said in speech at the party's two-day national conference on Sunday.
Chrupalla was elected as the AfD's co-leader on Saturday. He replaced Alexander Gauland, a founding member of the party in 2013, who became the party's first honorary member on Sunday.
The AfD, which currently leads the opposition in the Bundestag, was set to become a "really serious political power" within the next few years, said Chrupalla.
"I see the biggest voter potential in the conservative, middle-class camp," he said, adding that "only with convincing content can we tap new classes of voters."
Chrupalla has previously pledged to take a moderate course and appeal to voters in the mainstream middle classes, including women.
AfD: A platform for grievances
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Chrupalla will lead the party alongside Jörg Meuthen, who has also kept his distance from the radical right.
"It's all going our way," Meuthen said on Sunday. "That's why we need to be ready, we have to be good."
Resistance from far-right faction
Andreas Kalbitz, who was again selected for the party's federal committee, told DW that the party's new maxim in working together is "fewer fractures, more bridges." He is seen as the central strategist of the ultra far-right wing in the AfD.
Among them is the AfD head in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, who uses language that has echoes of Hitler's Third Reich.
Two years ago, Höcke criticized Berlin's Holocaust memorial, saying Germans were "the only people in the world to plant a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital."
But on Sunday, Höcke appeared to try and avoid conflict with the party's new course.
"I have no time for Berlin," he told DW. As party leader in Thuringia, he said he had enough to do and that he could also influence the party from his state. But he stressed that this order of priorities was not set in stone.
Despite the comments from his fellow party members, Chrupalla said on Saturday that he wanted to prepare the party for government.
Germany's mainstream political parties have so far refused to consider forming a coalition with the AfD at the federal level, as well as in state governments.
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.
