In the end, Alexander Gauland could be satisfied. His favorite candidate Tino Chrupalla had made it. The Saxon will lead alongside Jörg Meuthen the AfD in the next two years. However, the 44-year-old faction vice had to go for it in a runoff - against his rivals from the parliamentary group, Gottfried Curio.
But the musician and physicist, who appeals to a large fan base in the AfD via YouTube, held a rather weak speech for his circumstances. Chrupalla eventually prevailed with just under 54 percent against the representative from Berlin, who came to around 41 percent. So the management question was clarified for now. Gauland can now focus on his work as a Co-faction chairman in the Bundestag, honorary chairman of the AfD, the 78-year-old is still in Braunschweig anyway.
Chrupalla can be different too
Above all, Chrupalla had won a novelty: an "academic" such as Co-Party leader Meuthen and a "non-academic" like him, a representative from the West and one from the East, that the party could set a "historic sign".
The painting and painting master - he emphasized his training - fits in with Gauland's concept of the AfD as a party for the "little people" - a picture that the departing boss in Braunschweig once again endeavored. Chrupalla, who was in the nineties two years with the Junge Union and in 2017 for the election to today's Saxon CDU Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer in his constituency proposed, presented himself as a moderate force. The "middle-class," he warned, reach the AfD "only with reason", for the AfD need "no drastic sayings" that "often do the opposite, especially in the women".
That Chrupalla rhetorically also very different, he had, however, shown in a parliamentary debate on the anniversary of the fall of the Wall, in which he sharply attacked Chancellor Angela Merkel and their activity in the FDJ of the GDR in the center of his speech.
Sympathies in the right "wing"
Chrupallas election to the new Gauland was not a matter of course, in the first ballot he came against Curio and the Lower Saxony country chief Dana Guth only about 44 percent. His success may be due in the end to the support of the nationalist-national "wing" network around Björn Höcke and Andreas Kalbitz. Although not a member of the "wing", Chrupalla had publicly sought their proximity in the summer and enjoys sympathy there.
Video analysis: "The party is not less right than before"
THE MIRROR
During the party congress in Braunschweig, Höcke praised journalists for the Saxons as the voice of the East, as "an organizational talent" who had done "good work" as a parliamentary group vice-chairman. The Thuringian state and parliamentary leader, who sees the AFD outside the parliaments as a movement party, was satisfied with Gauland's successor. Chrupalla has "understanding that we need to continue to use the road as a resonance chamber." That's why "we say yes to Tino Chrupalla," Höcke told journalists.
In Braunschweig it became apparent that right-wing, outraged outsiders outside the "wing" are now being punished. As Wolfgang Gedeon, Baden-Württemberg AfD politician, as a candidate for the AFD presidency, many of the 592 delegates demonstratively left the hall - apparently the extract was denied. Against Gedeon - he is "an AfD in the AfD" - is running an expulsion because of the charge of anti-Semitic statements.
"Antifama Spectacle"
Gedeon's attacks against the top were bizarre, even for AFD. Co-party leader Meuthen take over the "diction of the left", making it the AfD "the tip against the right". Buh and Pfui calls followed, a supporter Gedeons, the Baden-Württemberg AfD politician Dubravko Mandic, went to the podium and spoke of an "anti-FIFA spectacle".
Even the attempt of a small group of party rights to the Baden-Württemberg AfD state parliament delegate Stefan Räpple failed to make the donation scandal of Co-party leader Jörg Meuthen to the topic. Their request, which was supposed to deal with the question of liability, was not put on the agenda at the beginning of the congress by majority vote. Meuthen in turn - since mid-2015 co-party chief - once again asserted that he had done nothing "indecent, wrong or illegal". Against the fines of the Bundestag in the amount of 402,900 euros, the party is currently in court.
In the cosmos of the AfD, the donation affair did not harm Meuthen, at least not in Braunschweig: Meuthen prevailed with about 69 percent against Gedeon and the member of the Bundestag Nicole Höchst. In his application speech, Meuthen presented himself as a moderate representative. He does not make his face available to a party that threatens to slip into a "creeping toleration of extremist positions," according to the co-boss, since summer 2015 at the head of the AfD. The task for the next two years is to become "governing and willing".
Beatrix von Storch needs two ballots
The party schedule, which was almost routine for AfD standards, came to a halt in the evening. While in the election of the Federal Vices the co-faction leader Alice Weidel unopposed candidates to 76 percent elected the first deputy and the youngest by the Bundestag as Chairman of the Committee on Legal Affairs Stephan Brandner second vice were withdrawn, the election of the third deputy down.
On the track remained the previous vice Georg Pazderski. In the summer he had signed an internal declaration against Höcke. In two ballots, the Berlin head of state could not prevail against the AFD member of parliament Stephan Protschka and finally renounced.
But AfD Group Vice Beatrix von Storch, who then went for Pazderski into the race, needed two ballots, to prevail in the end just under 51 percent against Protschka. Level of that Protschka, which had recently made a headline for a by now mined in Poland memorial stone for German free-fighter fighters, in which even the far-right "Young Nationalists" had participated.
Gauland: "We do not storm Bastille, we are not good at revolution"
At the beginning of the congress, Gauland devoted parts of his speech to the state of the AfD. "Adults" do not mean to be adapted, he campaigned for his course. The pressure by the constitution protection - the "wings" and the young alternative are suspicious cases in the range of the right-wing extremism since spring - is "enormous". Because that is so, you have to be "smart" and "steadfast and make it as hard as possible for our enemies". The AfD must continue on the path of a "patriotic, democratic, bourgeois people's party", to this there is "no alternative".
Which spirit in the AfD continues to waft, made Gauland indirectly self-public. In Braunschweig he spoke of "some" who dreamed of a "small social-revolutionary party", but this dream was "unreal", in Germany there was no tradition for it. "We're not storming Bastille, we're not good at revolution," Gauland's analysis says.
The AfD, said Gauland, must become so strong in "democratic elections" that it will no longer be possible to exclude them from the "power of this country" for longer.
As far as the CDU is concerned, Gauland - he was once in the party for more than four decades - was much more skeptical than many others in the AfD who hope for their end. Their "decomposition" has just begun, but it is "not sure that the CDU is falling apart." It will come, so Gaulands hope, but the day, "on which a weakened CDU has only one option - us".
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