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.
Read more: What drives the far-right AfD’s success in eastern Germany?
‘Convincing content’ needed
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.
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 right-wing faction in the AfD.
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
The AfD’s attempt to forge a more moderate path will likely be met with resistance by some members of the party’s far-right faction.
Among them is the AfD head in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, who sometimes uses language that has echoes of Hitler’s Third Reich.
Read more: Nazi ‘bird shit’ and the limits of free speech in Germany
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 a state premier 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.
Gauland himself once compared the Nazi era to a speck of “shit” when held up to Germany’s greater history. He also suggested that people could “dispose of” a government official with a Turkish background “in Anatolia.”
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.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland
Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team’s defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch – but people would not want “someone like Boateng as a neighbor.” He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: “We can’t be blackmailed by children’s eyes.”
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alice Weidel
Alice Weidel generally plays the role of “voice of reason” for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians “pigs” and “puppets of the victorious powers in World War II. Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Frauke Petry
German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must “use firearms if necessary” to “prevent illegal border crossings.” Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame” and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year – leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
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. “And we have to defend ourselves against attackers.”
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Marcus Pretzell
Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote “These are Merkel’s dead,” shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Wendt
The member of parliament in Germany’s eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, 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.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland – again …
During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be “disposed of” back to Anatolia. The German term, “entsorgen,” raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
… and again
Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD’s youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany’s responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say 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.”
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andreas Kalbitz
The Brandenburg state AfD chief admitted in 2019 to attending a 2007 rally in Greece by the ultranationalist Golden Dawn party at which a swastika flag was raised. “Der Spiegel” had published a leaked report by the German embassy in Athens naming him as one of “14 neo-Nazis” who arrived from Germany for the far-right rally. Kalbitz released a statement saying he took part out of “curiosity.”
Author: Dagmar Breitenbach
law/cmk (AFP, dpa)
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