Despite being fairly popular, Alternative for Germany (AfD) — the country's Euroskeptic political party — continues to splinter from within. Party members held a lengthy emergency meeting Aug. 14 in Kassel to sort out a dispute between co-leaders Frauke Petry and Jorg Meuthen, who have ideologically diverged in recent months. Their differences over the party's direction have created a rift between the party's moderate and extreme factions, one that could threaten the AfD's ability to settle on whom it puts forth to represent it in Germany's upcoming parliamentary elections.
The AfD was founded by a group of economics professors whose concerns largely centered on financial issues. Unsurprisingly, their platform focused primarily on critiquing the eurozone. But under Petry's leadership, the party has adopted an explicitly anti-Islam message as well, a shift that does not sit well with some of its members. Though the latest meeting's participants voted 37-13 against holding a party conference to replace Petry, her temporary victory will not seal the cracks forming inside the AfD as a result of her leadership.
In fact, two informal factions have already coalesced: around Petry, based in Saxony, and around Meuthen, based in Baden-Wuerttemberg. When the AfD failed to isolate a party member accused of anti-Semitism in early July, Meuthen and 13 other members set out to form a new parliamentary group called Alternative for Baden-Wuerttemberg.
The party's widening divisions could hurt its performance in Germany's next parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for late 2017. According to an INSA poll published Aug. 16, the AfD is polling at around 13.5 percent across the country. If it hopes to gain significant representation in parliament, it will need to present a unified candidacy and to reduce internal dissent before the vote, a task that will become increasingly difficult as discord undermines consensus among its members.
In the meantime, however, the party will have to get through regional elections in the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin on Sept. 4 and 18, respectively. By all accounts, the AfD's popularity remains relatively unshaken by its internal crises. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the party currently has about 19 percent of the public's support, compared with the Social Democratic Party's 24 percent, the Christian Democratic Union's 23 percent and the Left Party's 19 percent. In Berlin, the AfD is polling at 14 percent, compared with the Social Democratic Party's 23 percent, the Christian Democratic Union's 18 percent and the Left Party's 15 percent. Relative to the figures seen in the states' 2011 elections, these percentages confirm that some voters are abandoning Germany's mainstream parties for their competitors on the right and left, including the AfD. But Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin are fairly small electoral districts. And with the national vote still more than a year away, a strong AfD performance in the September elections will not guarantee it success in the larger race in 2017.
