German AfD leader Frauke Petry is facing fresh rancor within her populist party over her call that it decide whether it is fit to govern or to stay in "fundamental" opposition. The party convenes on April 22.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
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A strategic direction resolution drafted by Petry for her party's main conference in Cologne - ahead of Germany's September election - drew further criticism on Saturday after regional AfD leaders had urged her to withdraw it.
Her federal co-leader, Jörg Meuthen, told the "Frankfurter Allgemeine" (FAZ) newspaper: "This initiative won't work at all."
"We must close the ranks, not split them. Whoever doesn't understand and accept that can neither lead the party nor the electoral campaign," said Meuthen.
Another Petry adversary and AfD deputy chairman Alexander Gauland (pictured right above with Petry and Meuthen) told FAZ that Petry's strategic thinking created "fully artificial frontlines."
"I have never understood what she intends to achieve except to deliver a justification for Höcke's expulsion proceedings," he said.
Petry, who has become the AfD's public face and presumed electoral frontrunner, wants the party to use her draft resolution to decide whether to seek governmental inclusion "at all levels" or to continue presenting marginal views - at the risk of losing middle-class clientele.
Example: Austria's FPÖ
As one model of her preferred "pragmatic politics" aimed at entering coalition governments, Petry pointed to Austria's far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ).
Austrian FPÖ head Heinz-Christian Strache with PetryImage: picture-alliance/dpa/S. Hoppe
Her AfD currently has footholds in 11 of Germany's 16 regional state assemblies. Nationwide it has waned to about 7 percent after Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives and Social Democrats led by Martin Schulz each stabilized their ratingsabove 30 percent.
Motion withdrawal demanded
The magazine "Stern" said delegates of 13 AfD regional branches, with the exception of Petry's Saxony branch, during a telephone conference on Friday had demanded she withdraw her resolution.
"In Cologne we must do everything to generate the [party's] unity and efficacy," said Lower Saxony branch chairman Armin-Paul Hampel, according to the German DPA news agency.
Expulsion proceedings
Gauland was referring to Björn Höcke, a figure in the AfD's Thuringia state branch, who in January called for a 180-degree rethink of Nazi-crime remembrance and described Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame."
Björn HöckeImage: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Two-thirds of the AFD's executive subsequently voted to oust Höcke, but any expulsion still hinges on a party arbitration body. Petry backed expulsion, saying Höcke had overstepped the mark of the "democratically tolerable."
In Cologne on April 22, 600 AfD delegates are due to decide on the party's election program and its leading election candidate or candidates. Among some, Gauland is favored as a member of a front-running team.
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.
