Germany: AfD party leaders — lurching further to the far right

In 2013 the economist co-founded the Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a euroskeptic party that he went on to represent in the European Parliament in 2014. He left the AfD in 2015 after losing a power struggle against its more xenophobic wing.

Konrad Adam, born 1942 in the western city of Wuppertal, is a German journalist and publicist. He was a member of the conservative CDU before becoming a founding member of the AfD. He left the party in 2021, blaming his longtime colleague Alexander Gauland for what he called the AfD's "tragic" development into a far-right party.

A chemist by training, Frauke Petry (*1975) began her career as a businesswoman before overcoming Bernd Lucke in an internal power struggle in 2015. But she left the party after another leadership battle in 2017. Petry is known for her anti-Islam views and made headlines in 2016 for saying that German police should "use firearms if necessary" to prevent illegal border crossings.

The economics professor, born in 1961, joined the AfD because of its euroskeptic positions. A nationalist conservative at heart, his rhetoric has been marked by xenophobia against migrants and Muslims. But he tried for years to push back against far-right extremists in the AfD — a struggle he lost. He resigned and left the party in January 2022, dogged by a donations scandal.

The former CDU member, born in 1941, is most notorious for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018: Acknowledging Germany's responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."

Tino Chrupalla, born in 1975 in eastern Germany, joined the AfD in 2015, attracted to its anti-immigration platform. The trained painter and decorator from Saxony has been an MP since 2017 and backs the far-right wing of the party, though he urges more moderate language.