After a series of election debacles, the AfD is stuck in fierce factional fighting. For the party conference in June, the Thuringian right wing Höcke is apparently planning a change in the statutes: If his camp finds the necessary majority, a single leader should also be possible in the future.
The Thuringian AfD state chairman Björn Höcke wants to turn the party leadership upside down at the upcoming federal party conference of the AfD. The editorial network Germany (RND) has several applications for the party congress, which should pave the way for a single leader. One of them comes from Höcke. "The federal board consists of one or two federal spokesmen," says the text of the application. The party leaders at the AfD are called federal spokespersons. So far, the statutes have provided for a double or triple leadership.
It is uncertain whether one of the motions will receive the required two-thirds majority on June 17. For reasons of proportional representation, many delegates might want to keep the dual leadership. In the past, however, there had always been heated arguments between the federal spokesmen at the top, most recently between the current chairman Tino Chrupalla and Jörg Meuthen, who threw in January and left the party.
Höcke expressly keeps an application for the national board open. He could imagine this "of course", he said in May at the state party conference. In Riesa he could first wait and see whether his application will go through. Chrupalla has announced that he will also fight for the top spot against Höcke.
After the two most recent election defeats, however, Chrupalla is on the defensive: in Schleswig-Holstein, the AfD was thrown out of the state parliament, in North Rhine-Westphalia it only just managed to re-enter. The day after the poor result in the elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Chrupalla gave a critical description of the state of the party he led: The current federal executive board was "unfortunately only concerned with personal animosity", in the party there was "cacophony," he said. He called his critics those "who peed in the tent" and added: "This has to stop."
From the point of view of the protection of the constitution, Höcke's entry into the AfD national board would be another indication of a development towards right-wing extremism. The President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, said at the end of May that the party's internal power struggle between moderates and extremists from the former "wing" had not yet been decided. "However, if Höcke is elected, that would be a clear indication that the party is developing further in the direction of right-wing extremism."
