The AfD leadership duo of Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla has conjured up a "departure" for the right-wing populist party, but themselves embody a different intention - that of consolidation.
The resignation of the previous party leader Jörg Meuthen, who acted confrontationally against right-wing extremist tendencies in the AfD, is now followed by a new style: behavior should be more important than beliefs.
The exponent of the right-wing radical current in the AfD, the Thuringian state chairman Björn Höcke, has already demonstrated this at the federal party conference in Riesa, not confrontationally, but confidently.
So now rest is the first duty of membership.
Behind this is the hope that with a new, less divided appearance, the AfD will be able to build on its old electoral successes and replenish its membership reservoir, which has fallen to around 30,000 members.
In many speeches, delegates evoked the times when the AfD rushed from electoral success to electoral success, even though its material foundations were much more modest than today.
But the dispute over how far to the right the AfD wants to position itself and how much it sees itself weakened or irritated by the observing eye of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution does not form the core of the explanation for its paralyzed success.
Rather, it lies in the fact that after Euroscepticism and fear of migration, no further social concern built up to a sufficiently large wave that a protest party like the AfD could have sailed from election victory to election victory.
In the current crises, whether Corona or the consequences of war, the AfD cannot really generate effective popular anger.
This is largely because such threats, generated by a virus or a nuclear ruler, are perceived as a general, global challenge.
The national imperative, to which the AfD is always limited, seems particularly helpless.