The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on Sunday voted for 76-year-old publicist Alexander Gauland and 38-year-old economist Alice Weidel to jointly lead its campaign for the country’s September national election.
A majority of AfD delegates backed the two candidates at a congress in Cologne. The right-wing AfD is seeking to win seats in the national parliament for the first time.
The vote followed a surprise announcement on Wednesday by co-leader Frauke Petry, the party’s public face, that she would not lead the AfD’s election campaign. This could boost mainstream parties and lessen the threat the right-wing AfD poses to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bid for a fourth term.
The latest polls put the AfD on 8 to 10 percent – around a third lower than at the end of last year but still above the 5 percent threshold for entering the Bundestag lower house of parliament.
But the party, which has lurched to the right since being founded as an anti-euro party in 2013, is treated as a pariah by established political parties, which refuse to work with it.
Gauland is widely seen a supporter of senior AfD member Bjoern Hoecke, who caused outrage in January by calling Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial a “monument of shame” and demanding a “180 degree turnaround” in Germany’s attempts to atone for Nazi crimes.
Weidel, a little-known figure in the AfD who is seen as a more moderate voice, is in favour of Hoecke being expelled. She has sought to establish herself as a financial and economy expert in the party.
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