- Title: Germany's divided anti-immigrant party faces rocky election road
- Date: 2nd March 2017
- Summary: ERFURT, GERMANY (FILE - SEPTEMBER 21, 2016) (REUTERS) PLACARD AT AFD RALLY SHOWING CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL AS VEILED WOMAN, READING (German): "MULTI-CULTURAL MOM"
- Embargoed: 16th March 2017 18:17
- Keywords: AfD polls Germany elections far-right
- Location: VARIOUS, GERMANY
- City: VARIOUS, GERMANY
- Country: Germany
- Topics: Government/Politics,Elections/Voting
- Reuters ID: LVA006669NWAV
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Seven months before a national election, the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) is slipping in some polls. Its main campaign issue - refugees - is out of the limelight, infighting has taken hold and it is up against a Social Democrat candidate who looks like a real alternative to Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Support for the AfD has fallen to between 8.5 and 11 percent in recent polls - enough to cross the 5-percent threshold for entering parliament but down from highs of up to 15.5 percent at the end of last year.
"The refugee question is not being as intensively discussed as it used to be for a long while. There has been always a clear correlation: The more migrant issues were discussed, the stronger the AfD got," managing director of Forsa polling institute, Manfred Guellner, said.
More than a million migrants have arrived in Germany over the last two years and the AfD made "Stop the asylum chaos!" one of its key slogans. But arrivals have fallen sharply and the government is deporting rejected Afghan asylum seekers.
At the same time the AfD, which has long been prone to bickering and already split in mid-2015, has become so riven with internal strife that some members fear another break-up.
The latest bout of infighting kicked off in January when Bjoern Hoecke, AfD leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, called Berlin's Holocaust Memorial a "monument of shame" and said history books should focus more on German victims.
While AfD co-leader Frauke Petry and her supporters wanted him thrown out of the party, others defended him. In the end two-thirds of the executive board voted to expel him and a party arbitration body now has to decide whether to accept that.
The decision upset some party members, who signed a letter saying it was "excessive" and risked causing the party to split.
On Sunday (February 26) the party sent around 28,000 supporters a declaration - signed by senior party members including Hoecke and Petry - warning them that the recent "acrimonious discussions" had detracted from the party's aims and urging them to "close ranks in our joint fight against the old parties".
Asked about the risk of a split, Petry told Reuters: "The AfD is the AfD and the majority decides where we're going."
Adding to the AfD's problems, the centre-left SPD has chosen for its chancellor candidate Martin Schulz - a man with a common touch who has made fighting inequality a key campaign issue.
Guellner said the "Schulz effect" had probably cost the AfD around 1 percentage point in support as some voters switched camps in the hope Schulz would represent the "small people" and that by voting for the SPD, they would harm Merkel.
Schulz has already helped the SPD overtake Merkel's conservatives in some opinion polls and while the AfD is expected to emerge from the Sept. 24 vote as the third biggest force, no other parties want to form a coalition with the AfD.
Guellner said the AfD had already exhausted its potential because since the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, only around 10 percent of the German electorate had been susceptible to voting for radical right-wing parties.
"At first it looks like there were uniform developments in various western European countries - Austria, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, France. But I think one has to take a close look, then it becomes obvious that the far-right populist movements differ from each other and in Germany you have to speak about the AfD as a right-wing extremist movement, it is not a far-right populist party as for example the FPO in Austria or the Danish People's Party in Denmark. They are not burning down refugee shelters, and in Germany refugee shelters are burning," Guellner explained.
The AfD faces its first real test in 2017 at a regional election on March 26 in Saarland, a small western state that borders France and Luxembourg. Recent polls put it on 9 to 10 percent there. - Copyright Holder: FILE REUTERS (CAN SELL)
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