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The extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is fighting stagnant polling results and suspicions of illegal funding, is now torn apart by a widening gap between its leaders and its most radical wing .
The turbulence comes as falling migrant arrivals have deprived the ultra-nationalist protest party of its main rallying cause, while the ascending Greens have replaced it as the most powerful opposition force. .
The six-year-old AfD, who has experienced splits and power coups, is now torn between supporters and hard-fought party enemies Bjoern Hoecke, months ahead of crucial state polls in its center, in the former East of the Communist.
Hoecke, 47, is a party leader in the eastern state of Thuringia and heads the faction of the most extreme party, "The Wing", which is officially overseen by the national intelligence services. .
The former history teacher once called the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a "monument of shame" and marched hand in hand with the anti-Islam Pegida street movement during A rally attended by neo-Nazis in Chemnitz.
At a meeting of his group last weekend, Hoecke dramatically entered the room flanked by supporters waving a flag before brutally attacking the party's national leadership.
He promised that after the autumn elections in the states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia, he would devote himself "with great pbadion" to the election of the new leaders of the national party.
& # 39; Cult of personality & # 39;
A few days later, 100 AfD politicians attacked Hoecke's "excessive cult of personality" in a letter and declared that "the AfD is not the Bjoern Hoecke party".
AFD co-leaders Joerg Meuthen and Alexander Gauland also expressed their criticism, fearing that the rhetoric of the extreme right would scare voters who consider themselves conservative patriots anxious for the future. ;immigration.
Gauland said that he found the two Hoecke's performance "inappropriate" and baderted that if the party did not act "professionally", it would never win the "majority of the middle clbad of which we have need to change this country ".
Similar battles have broken out in several German regions, notably in Bavaria, where an internal party committee has declared that The Wing has a "competitive relationship" with the AfD.
The internal divide is the latest in date for the AfD, which had been founded as a Eurosceptic party in 2013 and opposed the rescue of Greece and other indebted countries.
After a first coup to the leadership of the party, she increasingly opposed immigration, multiculturalism and Islam, especially after the war. mbadive influx of migrants and refugees in 2015 in Germany.
"Crisis of puberty"
The AfD is particularly powerful in East Germany, which, nearly 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is lagging behind the West in terms of its size. Jobs and prosperity and is a hotbed of xenophobia, hate-motivated racist crime and support for far-right groups.
"Merkel has to leave" was a common song at the AfD and Pegida rallies where most white and middle-aged men expressed their fury at what they view as a political and media elite that has them betrayed.
While public fears about immigration have somewhat diminished, the AfD has increasingly campaigned on other issues – against wind farms, against Driving bans on diesel cars and against climate change caused by humans, a position that even the youth rejected by AfD.
In the European Parliament elections in May, the AfD recorded a score of 10.9%, lower than what he had hoped.
In the midst of the ideological war within the party, the eastern Magdeburger Volksstimme newspaper wrote that "the AfD is torn once more".
Gauland, 78, a defector of Merkel's CDU party, said the AfD was going through a "puberty crisis" that was hampering its efforts to poach unhappy conservative voters.
The daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said that "the Gauland's dream of a force that brings together conservatives and radicals is proving to be more and more a naive illusion".
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