German nationalist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is moving even further to the right. Outside the Euroskeptic party's April 23 congress in Cologne, some 10,000 people protested the AfD's anti-immigrant rhetoric. Inside, delegates doubled down on the party's core ideology, rejecting efforts to steer the party slightly more toward the mainstream and choosing new leadership to guide the party through Germany’s general elections in September.
The party's two new co-leaders are Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel. While Weidel, an economist, belongs to the party's relatively moderate wing, Gauland is a staunch right-winger. He is perhaps best known for his nationalist stances and support for Bjorn Hocke, a figure popular with the AfD's grassroots supporters whose opposition to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin in January led to a split within the party. Hocke was subsequently expelled from the AfD by the party's ruling executive, former co-leader Frauke Petry, who has been trying to distance the AfD from far-right positions, pushing against racist, anti-Semitic and overtly nationalist ideologies in order to attract moderate voters.
Petry, however, has faced backlash from the rank-and-file, and she announced April 19 that she would not lead the party through the general elections. During the congress in Cologne, Petry formally resigned her position, and party delegates refused to discuss her strategy to move AfD into the mainstream enough to be able to form coalitions with other parties after the elections. Instead, the congress adopted a platform focused on its hard-line stance on immigration, as well as on leaving the eurozone and returning to the deutsche mark.
These developments underscore the AfD's firm orientation toward the far right, which could limit its success in the parliamentary elections in September. The party was founded on a platform opposing the euro in 2013 by economist Bernd Lucke, who in 2015 failed to prevent the party from drifting to the right and was forced to hand over leadership to Petry, then a stronger proponent of anti-immigrant positions. At the time, the strategy was successful, and support for the AfD peaked at around 14-15 percent during Europe's migrant crisis. Under Petry, the party won regional parlimentary seats in 11 of Germany's 16 states.
But the party's performance has been gradually slipping in the polls over the past few months. Regional elections in Schleswig-Holstein on May 7 and, more important, in North Rhine-Westphalia on May 14 will gauge whether the AfD's move further to the right might pay off with voters in the Sept. 24 general elections. Currently, polls suggest the AfD would win around 9-10 percent of the vote in the national elections — above the 5 percent threshold required for the party to enter the German parliament for the first time.
