Alice Weidel has enough to do at the top of the AfD. In Baden-Württemberg she no longer competes. Martin Hess is her preferred successor. He says he doesn't want anything to do with "problematic groups."
Berlin / Stuttgart (dpa / lsw) - The candidate for the state chairmanship of the AfD in the southwest, Martin Hess, wants his party to be differentiated from "problematic groups and people". He also pleaded for unity: "Fighting parties are never well received by voters," said the member of the Bundestag of the German Press Agency in Berlin.
The Thuringian AfD head of state Björn Höcke said at the federal party conference on June 19 that the party wanted to determine "by our own strength, our own self-confidence, our own will" who was an extremist and from whom one distanced oneself. Hess said he personally found such a statement problematic. The domestic politician, who worked as a police officer before moving into politics, added: "I don't think it's expedient in this form." It is true that the AfD is distancing itself "from certain problematic groups and people" on its own.
At the state party conference planned for next weekend, the AfD will elect a new state executive. The previous state chairwoman Alice Weidel now heads the parliamentary group and the federal party together with Tino Chrupalla. She no longer competes in Baden-Württemberg. Member of the Bundestag Dirk Spaniel also wants to run for the presidency in the southwest.
Spaniel had already led the state association in 2019 with state parliamentary group leader Bernd Gögel in a dual leadership. At that time there had been a lot of arguments in the board of directors. At the federal party conference in Riesa, party right wing Höcke supported an application submitted by Spaniel. In the end, a majority followed Spaniel's proposal to remove the "Centrum Union" from a list on which the AfD lists organizations and clubs whose members are denied access to the party. The long and heated debate at the party conference was mainly about certain members of the association in Baden-Württemberg.
