German far-right to pick new leaders as protesters rally
HANOVER, Germany: The far-right Alternative for Germany gathers yesterday to elect new leadership, with police bracing for potentially violent street protests against the anti-migrant, anti-Islam party.
The AfD captured nearly 13 per cent of the vote and almost 100 seats in parliament in a September general election — a watershed moment in post-war German politics.
However a festering row between radical nationalists and more moderate forces has roiled its top brass, with coleader Frauke Petry abruptly quitting the AfD just days after the election to form her own breakaway party.
Some 600 delegates at the twoday congress in the northern city of Hanover will vote on a replacement for her as well as a new board, determining the ideological direction of the party as it gears up to oppose Chancellor Angela Merkel’s yet-to-be-formed government.
“The AfD is unable to settle down, it is wrestling with the course it wants to take and power within the party,” news website Spiegel Online said.
“The fight over posts and the platform shows that the party is still divided on how sharply rightward it wants to go.”
The meeting is expected to draw around 8,500 leftist protesters supporting Merkel’s liberal border policy, which allowed in more than one million asylum seekers since 2015.
The GdP police union called for calm, following clashes with demonstrators in the western city of Cologne during the last AfD congress in April that left several officers injured.
“We expect all participants in the rallies to exercise their right of assembly peacefully,” union leader Dietmar Schilff said. “Any violence will lead to the forfeiture of that right.”
Hanover police chief Uwe Lange said the congress centre hosting the AfD event would be ringed with barbed wire and security barriers to protect delegates, with thousands of officers deployed.
Launched as a populist antieuro party in 2013, the AfD has veered sharply to the right since and campaigned for the September election with slogans such as ‘Bikinis Not Burkas’, ‘Stop Islamisation’ and the ubiquitous ‘Merkel must go’. — AFP