After the previous AfD chairman Jörg Meuthen left the party, the former CDU politician Erika Steinbach announced her intention to join.
"The deliberately destructive departure of Jörg Meuthen, who is well off retaining his European mandate, is a slap in the face for many who stood behind him," Steinbach said on Twitter on Friday evening.
"The AfD didn't deserve that.
Therefore, I will now apply for membership.”
Meuthen had previously announced his departure.
"Large parts of the party and with it a number of its leading representatives have opted for an increasingly radical course, not just linguistically uninhibited, for political positions and verbal gaffes that are driving the party into complete isolation and ever further to the political fringes," reasoned the longtime party leader made his decision.
Steinbach (78), a long-time Frankfurt city councilor and member of the Bundestag and President of the Association of Expellees, left the CDU in 2017.
She justified this, among other things, with the refugee policy of the then Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU).
Since 2018, Steinbach has chaired the AfD-affiliated Desiderius Erasmus Foundation.
Actually, she had no intention of joining a party again, she wrote now.
The "indisputable handling of the media and politics with the AfD" and the "incomprehensible, unfair exit" Meuthens would have made them rethink.
She described the AfD as the "only bourgeois alternative" and "political glimmer of hope".
"As the last few months have clearly shown, extremist and anti-constitutional efforts have no place in the AfD," said Steinbach.