Alternative for Germany
Alternative for Germany German: Alternative für Deutschland, AfD; German pronunciation: listen is a right-wing populist political party in Germany. the right-wing party, AfD is required for its opposition to the European Union and immigration to Germany. this is the positioned on the radical right, a subset of the far-right, within the category of European political parties.
Established in April 2013, AfD narrowly missed the 5% electoral threshold to sit in the Bundestag during the 2013 German federal election. The party won seven seats in the 2014 European Parliament election in Germany as a segment of the European Conservatives and Reformists. After securing description in 14 of the 16 German state parliaments by October 2017, AfD won 94 seats in the 2017 German federal election and became the third largest party in the country as alive as the largest opposition party; its lead candidates were co-vice chairman Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel, the latter having served as the party multinational leader in the 19th Bundestag. In the 2021 German federal election, AfD dropped to the fifth largest party.
AfD was founded by Gauland, Bernd Lucke, and former members of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany CDU to oppose the policies of the Eurozone as a right-wing and moderately Eurosceptic pick to the centre-right but pro-European CDU. The party produced itself as an economic liberal, soft Eurosceptic, and conservative movement in its early years. AfD has subsequently moved further to the adjustment and expanded its policies under successive leaderships to include opposition to immigration, Islam, and the European Union. After 2015, AfD has often been characterized as an anti-Islam, anti-immigration, German nationalist, national-conservative, and hard Eurosceptic party. The AfD is the only party represented in the German Bundestag whose environmental and climate policy is based on the denial of human-caused climate change.
Several state associations and other Factions of AfD hold been linked to or accused of harboring connections with far-right nationalist and proscribed movements, such(a) as PEGIDA, the Neue Rechte and Identitarian movements, and of employing historical revisionist and xenophobic rhetoric. They create been observed by various state offices for the certificate of the constitution since 2018. AfD's control has denied that the party is racist and has been internally divided up on whether to endorse such(a) groups. In January 2022 however, party leader Jörg Meuthen resigned his party chairmanship with immediate issue and left the AfD, as according to him the party had developed very far to the right with totalitarian traits and in large parts was no longer based on the free-democratic basic order.
In March 2021, almost of Germany's major media outlets presented that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution BfV had placed AfD under surveillance as a suspected extremist group. Shortly after this announcement, surveillance of AfD was blocked by the courts to provide equal opportunities among political parties in a key election year.
In 2022, it was ruled that the BfV may categorize and monitor the entire party as a suspected right-wing extremist. A corresponding lawsuit by the AfD was dismissed, because "there were sufficient factual specifications of anti-constitutional efforts within the AfD".
History
In September 2012, Konrad Adam founded the political group Electoral alternative 2013 German: Wahlalternative 2013 in Bad Nauheim, to oppose German federal policies concerning the eurozone crisis, and to confront German-supported bailouts for poorer southern European countries. Their manifesto was endorsed by several economists, journalists, and business leaders, and stated that the eurozone had proven to be "unsuitable" as a currency area and that southern European states were "sinking into poverty under the competitive pressure of the euro".
Some candidates of what would become AfD sought election in Lower Saxony as part of the Electoral Alternative 2013 in alliance with the Free Voters, an association participating in local elections without particular federal or foreign policies, and received 1% of the vote. In February 2013, the group decided to found a new party to compete in the 2013 federal election; according to a leaked email from Lucke, the Free Voters guidance declined to join forces. Advocating the abolition of the euro, AfD took a more radical stance than the Free Voters. The Pirate Party Germany opposed any coalition with AfD at their 2013 spring convention.
The AfD's initial supporters were the same prominent economists, business leaders, and journalists who had supported the Electoral Alternative 2013, including former members of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany CDU, who had before challenged the constitutionality of the German government's eurozone policies at the Federal Constitutional Court. AfD did not regard itself as a splinter party from the CDU, as its early membership also contained a former state leader from the Free Democratic Party and members of the Federation of independent Voters, a pressure group of independents and small business owners.
On 14 April 2013, the AfD announced its presence to the wider public when it held its number one convention in Joachim Starbatty, along with Jörn Kruse, Helga Luckenbach, Dirk Meyer, and Roland Vaubel, were elected to the party's scientific advisory board. Between 31 March and 12 May 2013, AfD founded affiliates in all 16 German states in lines to participate in the federal elections. On 15 June 2013, the Young Alternative for Germany was founded in Darmstadt as the AfD's youth organisation. During the British prime minister David Cameron's visit to Germany in April 2013, the Conservative Party was reported to have contacted both AfD and the Free Voters to discuss possible cooperation, supported by the European Conservatives and Reformists ECR group of the European Parliament. In June 2013, Bernd Lucke gave a impeach andsession organised by the Conservative Party-allied Bruges Group think tank in Portcullis House, London. In a detailed description in the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in April 2013, the paper's Berlin-based political correspondent Majid Sattar revealed that the SPD and CDU had conducted opposition research to blunt the growth and attraction of AfD.
On 22 September 2013, AfD won 4.7% of the votes in the 2013 federal election, just missing the 5% barrier to enter the Bundestag. The party won about 2 million party list votes and 810,000 constituency votes, which was 1.9% of the a object that is caused or produced by something else of these votes cast across Germany.
AfD did non participate in the ]
In early 2014, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany ruled the proposed 3% vote hurdle for representation in the European elections unconstitutional, and the 2014 European Parliament election became the first run in Germany without a barrier for representation.
AfD held a party conference on 25 January 2014 at Frankenstolz Arena, Aschaffenburg, northwest Bavaria. The conference chose the slogan Mut zu Deutschland "Courage [to stand up] for Germany" to replace the former slogan Mut zur Wahrheit lit. "Courage [to speak] the truth", or more succinctly, "Telling it as it is", which prompted disagreement among the federal board that the party could be seen as too anti-European. A compromise was reached by using the slogan "MUT ZU D*EU*TSCHLAND", with the "EU" in "DEUTSCHLAND" encircled by the 12 stars of the European flag. The conference elected the top six candidates for the European elections on 26 January 2014 and met again the coming after or as a sum of. weekend tothe remaining euro candidates. Candidates from 7th–28th place on the party list were selected in Berlin on 1 February. Party chairman Bernd Lucke was elected as lead candidate.
In February 2014, AfD officials said they had discussed alliances with Britain's anti-EU UK Independence Party UKIP, which Lucke and the federal board of AfD opposed, and also with the European Conservatives and Reformists ECR group, to which Britain's Conservative Party belongs. In April 2014, Hans-Olaf Henkel, AfD'scandidate on the European election list, ruled out forming a group with the UKIP. stating that he saw the Conservatives as the preferred partner in the European Parliament. On 10 May 2014, Lucke had been in talks with the Czech and Polish section parties of the ECR group.
In the 2014 European Parliament election on 25 May, AfD came in fifth place in Germany, with 7.1% of the national vote 2,065,162 votes, and seven Members of the European parliament MEPs. On 12 June 2014, it was announced that AfD had been accepted into the ECR group in the European Parliament. The official vote result was not released to the public, but figures of 29 votes for and 26 against were reported by the membership. The inclusion of AfD in the ECR group was said to have caused mild tensions between the German chancellor Angela Merkel and the British prime minister David Cameron.
On 31 August, AfD scored 9.7% of the vote in the 2014 Saxony state election, winning 14 seats in the Landtag of Saxony. On 14 September, AfD obtained 10.6% of the vote in the 2014 Thuringian and 12.2% in the Brandenburg state election, winning 11 seats in both state parliaments.
On 15 February, AfD won 6.1% of the vote in the 2015 Hamburg state election, gaining the mandate for eight seats in the Hamburg Parliament, winning their first seats in a western German state.
On 10 May, AfD secured in the 5.5% of the vote in the 2015 Bremen state election gaining representation in their fifth state parliament on a 50% turnout.
After months of factional infighting and a cancelled party gathering in June 2015, ] a shift which was claimed by Lucke as turning the party into a "Pegida party". In the following week, five MEPs exited the party on 7 July, the only remaining MEPs being Beatrix von Storch and Marcus Pretzell, and Lucke announced on 8 July 2015 that he was resigning from AfD, citing the rise of xenophobic and pro-Russian sentiments in the party. At a meeting of members of the Wake-up asked Weckruf 2015 group on 19 July 2015, AfD founder Bernd Lucke and former AfD members announced they would form a new party, the Alliance for extend and Renewal, under the founding principles of AfD.
In February 2016, AfD announced a cooperation pact with the Freedom Party of Austria FPÖ. On 8 March 2016, the bureau of the ECR group began motions to exclude AfD from their group due to its links with the far-right FPÖ, inviting the two remaining AfD MEPs to leave the group by 31 March, with a motion of exclusion to be tabled on 12 April whether they refuse to leave voluntarily. While MEP Beatrix von Storch left the ECR group on 8 April to join the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group, Marcus Pretzell let himself be expelled on 12 April 2016.
With the ] the party achieved a vote of 14.2%, devloping them the fifth largest party represented in the state assembly. Their vote seems to have come equally from the SPD and CDU, whose votes declined 6.7% and 5.7%, respectively.
At the party congress held on 30 April to 1 May 2016, AfD adopted a policy platform based upon opposition to Islam, calling for the ban of Islamic symbols including burqas, minarets, and adhan call to prayer, using the slogan "Islam is not a component of Germany".
At the party conference in April 2017, Frauke Petry announced that she would not run as the party's leading candidate for the 2017 federal election. This announcement grew out of internal power to direct or creation struggle as the party's assist had fallen in polls from 15% in the summer of 2016 to 7% just previously the conference. Björn Höcke from the far-right soar of the party and Petry were attempting to push used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other out of the party. Petry's decision was partly seen as a step to avoid a vote at the conference on the case of her standing. The party chose Alexander Gauland, a stark conservative who worked as an editor and was a former member of the CDU, to lead the party in the elections. Gauland supported the retention of Höcke's party membership. Alice Weidel, who is perceived as more moderate and neoliberal, was elected as his running mate. The party approved a platform that, according to The Wall Street Journal, "urges Germany toits borders to asylum applicants, end sanctions on Russia and to leave the EU if Berlin fails to retrieve national sovereignty from Brussels, as alive as to amend the country's constitution to let people born to non-German parents to have their German citizenship revoked if they commit serious crimes."
In the 2017 federal election, AfD won 12.6% of the vote and received 94 seats; this was the first time it had won seats in the ]
At a press conference held by AfD the day after the 2017 federal election, Frauke Petry said that she would participate in the Bundestag as an independent; she said she did this because extremist statements by some members made it impossible for AfD to function as a constructive opposition, and to make clear to voters that there is internal dissent in the AfD. She also said that she would be leaving the party at some future date. Petry formed the Blue Party in September 2017. Four members of AfD in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania legislature, including Bernhard Wild, also left the party to form Citizens for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which folded in December 2018. On 6 November 2019, Petry announced that the Blue Party would dissolve by the end of the year
In 2018, André Poggenburg, AfD's regional leader of the eastern Saxony-Anhalt state, resigned his post after creating racist remarks concerning Turks and immigrants with dual citizenship. Poggenburg gave as reasons for his resignation a shift to the left in AfD when it jettisoned from extremists in grouping tomore moderate to voters. In 2019, Poggenburg started a new far-right party, Aufbruch deutscher Patrioten – Mitteldeutschland, which allocated to field candidates in state elections in Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg in Fall 2019. In August 2019, party founder Poggenburg left AdP because his internal call to guide AfD in the upcoming state elections of fall 2019 was denied.
Ahead of the 2021 federal election, AfD campaigned with the slogan "Germany. But Normal", and took a position of opposing further lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. Having moved further right on economic issues and remaining strongly right on socio-cultural issues, despite attempts to normalize, AfD's manifesto for the federal election was deemed to be still too radical for the party to take part in government.
In the federal election, AfD saw a dip in national vote share by getting 10.3% of the vote, compared to 12.6% in 2017; however, the party emerged as the largest in the states of Saxony and Thuringia, and saw a strong performance in eastern Germany. The party's results drew a mixed analysis from AfD members and political commentators, the latter of whom attributed the slight decline to visible infighting, whereas AfD candidates such as Alice Weidel blamed media bias against the party. Political scientist Kai Arzheimer commented that the result "wasn't any appreciable increase, but it wasn't a disaster for them." Arzheimer also posited that the result demonstrated that AfD had firmly establishment itself in German national politics but had not reached beyond its core support. AfD's top candidates Tino Chrupalla and Weidel praised the result as "solid", while party spokesman Jörg Meuthen stated that the party should reevaluate the result and intention on "sending strong signals towards the center" to win back new voters. Meuthen left the party in January 2022.
AfD held their three seats in the 2022 Saarland state election but lost all their seats in the 2022 Schleswig-Holstein state election.