AfD backs far-right candidates in challenge to leadership

Germany’s populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) shifted even further to the right at the weekend after its ideological leader promised to kill off the EU, aided by extremist candidates in next year’s European election.

Riding high in federal polls on 22 per cent, AfD leaders told delegates gathered in Magdeburg that their decade-old party was “ready for more”, including power after next year’s state election in Saxony, where the party tops the polls on 28 per cent.

Though ostensibly about choosing candidates for next year’s European election, the three-day weekend gathering was, in reality, a further battle over who controls the AfD, and how far to go on policy and messaging.

While right-wing party leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla pushed an EU-critical line, the 600 delegates backed an even further right line from the AfD’s ideological mastermind, Björn Höcke.

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As AfD leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, where party popularity is at its highest nationwide with 32 per cent, Mr Höcke used that popularity to force through candidates he hopes will hasten the end of the EU in its present form in favour of a new, looser alliance of member states.

“This EU must die so that the true Europe can live,” Mr Höcke told a German broadcaster. “Voters have to be addressed in an emotional way... we want an alternative to the EU as globalisation agency.”

Demonstrating his command of the party from the conference floor, two-thirds of party conference delegates backed his lead candidate for next year’s election, Maximilian Krah, a controversial 46-year-old lawyer and former member of Germany’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union.

The MEP has been suspended several times from his European parliamentary group, the right/far-right Identity and Democracy, and has attracted headlines in Germany for representing men accused of chaining a migrant to a tree.

In Magdeburg, Mr Krah’s address had a strong pro-China and pro-Russian stance and touched on “repopulation” narratives popular in neo-Nazi circles. “By now we are the most interesting right-wing party in Europe,” he joked.

Other Höcke candidates who made the list variously described Brussels as a “source of poison” or demanded Europe be transformed into a “fortress”.

Casting his election net wide, the AfD’s second-placed Europe candidate Piotr Bystron promised: “We are fighting against the warmongers, the globalists who want to forcibly vaccinate us, expropriate and enslave us.”

With the Höcke-dominated list complete, talks at a second party conference next week will address tricky manifesto questions, such as how critical or conciliatory a stance to adapt on Nato.

Opening the conference, party co-leader Alice Weidel said the AfD was not just riding high in polls. It was also on a secure political and financial footing, she said, thanks to a late member’s generous donation of property, luxury cars and €10 million in gold.

Hours after showing an image of party members before a table filled with gold bars and ingots, the AfD conceded the image used was illustrative and had been generated by artificial intelligence.