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When Jörg Meuthen had finished his speech before being re-elected as Co-Chairman, half of the AFD delegates rose to applause in the hall in Braunschweig. The other half stayed seated. It was a sign of how divided the right-wing party is. The battles between the so-called moderates, which include Meuthen, and the Volkisch-National in the "wing" network around Björn Höcke and Andreas Kalbitz are not over.
At most there is a truce.
But in this still precarious state, the "wing" plays a crucial role. After the regional elections in the east, his representatives moved to Braunschweig strengthened. Here they could play their claims. Without the help of the "wing" the successor of the outgoing chairman Alexander Gauland on the party leadership would not have been elected co-chairman.
The result for Tino Chrupalla, who does not belong to the "wing", but whose proximity had searched publicly, as his candidacy became apparent, shows: Without the strengthened right winger runs nothing more in the AfD.
Höcke's opponent fell through
For Chrupalla the Thuringian AfD boss Höcke had explicitly advertised before the party congress. He is now a bit too prisoner. It remains to be seen how the 44-year-old Saxon wants to fulfill the expectations that Gauland associates with him as the bourgeois face of the AfD. One does not need "drastic sayings", the "bourgeois middle" one reaches "only with reason", so Chrupalla in Braunschweig. He will have to be measured by that. Some in the "wing" - but also other radicals in the party - just do not want that: a moderately occurring AFD. Their business model is the provocation, the linguistic and ideological shift of boundaries in parliaments, on the street as a movement party on the move.
Who - as the Berlin state party Georg Pazderski and the Rhineland-Palatinate parliamentary leader Uwe boy - had signed an anti-Höcke appeal in the summer, prevailed in the board elections. Also because a part of the allegedly "moderates" sided with the "wing" network. Meanwhile, there is talk of an internally "opportunist network" that has entered into a pact with Höcke and Kalbitz - the word testifies to the deep upheavals within the so-called moderate camp in the party.
The "wing" in the power center
Those who are supple can reach far higher in the AFD 2019 with the help of the "wing". This shows the example of the co-faction leader in the Bundestag, Alice Weidel, who was elected with 76 percent to the first deputy on the party leadership. Weidel, in the days of the former AfD party leader Frauke Petry still for an exclusion against Höcke, has long bowed the right-wing realities. Her former opposition to the "wing" mitigated her this year by a visit to the Höcke promoter Götz Kubitschek. He is not an afDler, but an important whisperer of the far right. Kubitschek had provided behind the scenes for a balance between Höcke and Weidel. In the "wing" itself, the course of moderation is not uncontroversial, but it requires its main representatives from some disparity - such as the self-restriction, Weidel not publicly attack.
Braunschweig shows: The "wing", ideologically still tight on the right edge, is strategically moved to the center and now determines significantly the personnel policy. Examples abound: Stephan Brandner elected the delegates to the second party vice, a designated demagogue. He was privileged to be able to present himself as a victim of the prevailing circumstances, after he had been deposed in the Bundestag as chairman of the Legal Committee. To Brandner the AfD probably still have their joy, he is even some even in the "wing" as unpredictable and idiosyncratic Canton.
Video analysis: "The party is not less right than before"
THE MIRROR
In Braunschweig, the reactions to the appearances of the far right, as part of the party really ticking, proved all Gauland confessions to the character of a bourgeois-conservative party defiance: Brandner was as much acclaimed as a Stephan Protschka, who as conciliators while scarce, but made it back to the federal executive committee. The Bayer had recently co-financed a (now cleared) monument in the Polish Upper Silesia for Freikorpskämpfer together with the NPD youth. Even Kalbitz, the actual organizer of the "wing", was re-elected to the federal executive committee.
Criticism only in private
The new honorary chairman Gauland, elected with 91 percent, does not even seem to mind the direction in which the AfD co-founded six years ago. Significant were his comments on the internal constitution of the party. In Braunschweig he described the dream of some of a "small social-revolutionary party" as "unreal" and campaigned for it to become so strong in democratic elections that the AfD could no longer be excluded from the country's "power to organize".
The fact that the 78-year-old was forced to emphasize such a matter of course shows what radical ideas exist in parts of the party. Gauland's last word was anything but self-assured. If the party "sometime goes in the wrong direction", then he will say what he thinks - but "always in private".
Gauland will know why such reminders are needed. After all, it was he who held his protective hand over the humps and its "wings" and holds. It was he who made him and his network grow up. This is Gauland's real legacy.