Germany's anti-immigrant AfD party has picked nationalist Alexander Gauland and economist Alice Weidel as its top candidates for Germany's federal election. Absent is high-profile co-leader Frauke Petry.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/R.Vennenbernd
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Delegates to the widely-protested congress in Cologne of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party chose Gauland and Weidel Sunday after Petry failed on Saturday to moderate the party's role. Gauland is widely regarded as the AfD's lead tactician and advocate of right-wing nationalism.
The 600 delegates voted by 67.7 percent to endorse Potsdam-based Gauland, 76, who once had various roles in Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat (CDU) party, especially in Hesse in the late-80s, and Weidel from the AfD's Baden-Württemberg branch.
To applause, Weidel, a business consultant active in China, said the AfD would "not be forced to keep its mouth shut," adding that "political correctness" belonged to the "waste heap of history."
Just before last year's Euro 2016 soccer championship, Gauland said Germans valued national football player Jerome Boateng - whose father is Ghanaian - as a sportsman but "would not want to live next to someone like him."
The AfD's other co-chairman, Jörg Meuthen, like Petry, also did not seek electoral candidacy, but was applauded by delegates.
Anti-immigrant, anti-Euro
The AfD, already with opposition footholds in 11 of Germany's 16 regional state assemblies, also adopted a program platform for the September 24 federal election, largely focused on stemming "unrestrained mass immigration" into Germany.
Their policy program also calls for Germany's departure from the eurozone and reintroduction of a new national currency - to be again called the Deutsche-Mark (DEM).
Delegates also endorsed measures to boost birthrates and promote families by motivating Germans to bring more children into the world to maintain what they termed the nation's Staatsvolk or "own constitutive people."
The AfD is 'dangerous,' says Catholic spokesman Lücking-Michel
Widespread opposition to AfD
Outside the venue, at Cologne's central Maritim Hotel, an estimated 10,000 opponents of the AfD, drawn from some 70 civic groups, protested Saturday, with the city tightly guarded by 4,000 heavily equipped police officers.
In further opposition, the Catholic church's youth organization, Bund Neudeutschland (ND) described the AfD's policies as contrary to the Christian view of humanity.
The ND's executive meeting in Würzburg at the weekend said interaction between Christians and the AfD was "wrong and dangerous" and described its family and gender policies as attempts to "ethnically instrumentalize" people of other origins.
"The AfD is folk-nationalist and foreigner-hostile," said ND director Claudi Lücking-Michel, who is also a CDU parliamentarian in Merkel's ranks.
During Saturday's Cologne protests, Catholic bishop Kardinal Rainer Maria Woelki said participants were out on the streets to emphasis "world-openness, tolerance and solidarity."
Petry, in conference remarks on Saturday, described the church statements about the AfD as "derogatory" and "ugly."
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.
