AfD switches to its dome to snatch the space from the right to the Merkel CDU

• Germany: An AfD granddaughter of a Nazi minister creates controversy over a gesture in parliament

Check out the great coalition of Angela Merkel and the Social Democratic Union (CDU). This is how the political party that is being fought in Germany remained yesterday after the victory in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) primaries of the duo that campaigned to break the Government, on the one hand, and appropriate Alternative for Germany (AfD) of the right space that the CDU has left claiming the center for the other.

"The CDU is increasingly socially democratized. They have claimed for themselves the political center, which leaves us alone on the right. We are what the CDU was and there this is our strength and our path, " said the outgoing president of AfD, Alexander Gauland to inaugurate this Saturday the X federal congress of the party. In the congress, which concludes today, about 600 delegates participate, of which approximately one third are part of the most radical current of the formation, the so-called "Die Flüge" - The wing -, led by Björn Höcke and Andreas Kalbitz.

The highlight of the congress was the election of a new directive with the big question in the air of who would replace Gauland , who, at 78, decided not to appear. However, the right was reserved to do so at the last minute if the candidates to succeed did not offer guarantees of "moderation." Moreover, to avoid the shocks of two years ago, when the very radical Doris Sayn-Wittgenstein was about to take over the presidency, Gauland appointed successor.

Since the re-election of MEP Jörg Meuthen was taken for granted, as was the case, Gauland needed his travel companion to come from the East , where AfD has achieved its main electoral successes, and could serve as a bridge between the different currents. The candidate should have good contacts with "Die Flüge" but not belong to the movement, so that it could be accepted by the moderates and more numerous delegates from the West. Gauland found that allegedly integrative figure in the parlor deputy Tino Chrupalla, responsible for financial matters in the fraction and virtually unknown.

" I am a man of words but of deeds . I am a family man and a master painter. I have no studies, but I know better than an academic what ordinary people feel when they get up even before dawn to go to work. I set up a company with seven workers and that is why I also understand problems of SMEs, squeezed into taxes like lemons, "Chrupalla said in his co-chair candidacy speech.

Gauland listened attentively as the master painter mixed the colors of the party and proclaimed himself a representative of the AfD voters, the perfect tandem for the Meuthen intellectual. " It is not televised. It will not be able to withstand the hard attacks of the journalists ", it was heard in the halls of the congress, that was celebrated in a ship of VW that the consortium covered so that their symbols were not seen - image matter- and with About 20,000 protesters in the vicinity, according to police sources.

Parity is not a priority

Chrupalla, who had the support of the most influential women in the party, such as Alice Weidel and Beatrix von Storch, for whom parity is not a priority, was chosen with 53% . Meuthen was re-elected with 63% of the votes, including those of the radical wing, while Meuthen's role in AfD is a good cop. " In this party there is no place for radicals . Nobody is wrong. We are patriots, but not nationalists. We are conservative, but not retrogressed," he insisted.

"Die Flüge" has doubled its presence in the Executive. It has been done with four of the 30 members of that management body, while Höcke launched its networks to the delegates of the West implying that he had made mistakes in the past and that he was willing to tolerate a CDU Government in Thuringia, where It has its headquarters, and the elections have left an arithmetic without majorities.

The shift to moderation requested by the leadership of AfD to its militancy in order to fill the void left by the CDU, contrasts with the resignation of the power that seems to have requested the SPD's militancy in a process of primaries that has given the duo victory leftist formed by Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken, both very critical of the great coalition.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project