Author : JANOSCH DELCKER

Posted : 8/4/2017

 

 

 

The head of Germany’s right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) wants to distance her party from far-right ideologies.

When the AfD meets in Cologne in two weeks, its co-leader Frauke Petry will push for a sentence to be included in the party’s manifesto stating that “there is no space for racist, anti-semitic … and nationalist ideologies” in the AfD, newspaper Freie Presse reported Saturday, quoting a motion signed by Petry.

The proposal is widely seen as an attempt to make the party more appealing to moderate voters who have been frightened off by the far-right rhetoric of other top officials including Björn Höcke, a regional party leader. Earlier this year, Höcke shocked with a comment about the Holocaust memorial in Berlin when he said that “Germans are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of [their] capital.”

Founded in 2013, the AfD holds seats in 11 of Germany’s 16 regional parliaments and hopes to enter the Bundestag in Berlin in the upcoming September election.

In recent polls, however, the party’s approval rating has fallen to single digits, from up to 13 percent just a couple of months ago, and some AfD officials have openly questioned Petry’s ability to lead the party.

Last week, she made headlines when she hinted in an interview with Tagesspiegel newspaper that she might consider withdrawing from politics.

On Friday, Frankfurter Allgemeine reported that Petry was planning to fight the backlash in her party by pursuing a “realpolitik strategy,” with the goal of eventually turning the AfD into a potential coalition partner for Germany’s political mainstream, similar to Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ).

Petry’s distinction between this pragmatic approach and a second, more radical tendency in the party drew harsh criticism from within its ranks.

AfD co-leader Jörg Meuthen shot back at Petry in Frankfurter Allgemeine on Friday, saying her initiative was doomed to fail, and that the AfD had to “close the ranks, not split them. Whoever doesn’t understand and accept that can neither lead the party nor the electoral campaign.”

At its party convention in late April in Cologne, the AfD is set to decide on its campaign strategy and on whether to nominate Petry as their only candidate or to run with a team of candidates.