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AfD boss Jörg Meuthen in the ZDF summer interview: "Throwing is not my style"
Photo: Christian Koch / dpa
Ten weeks before the general election, AfD chairman Jörg Meuthen admitted tensions in his party.
"These are all not my friends," said the party leader on Sunday in a ZDF interview when asked whether he supported candidates like Christina Baum from Baden-Württemberg or Stephan Brandner and Jürgen Pohl from Thuringia.
Meuthen said that he had tried until 2018 to integrate the "wing" founded in 2015 by the Thuringian AfD country chief Bjön Höcke into the party.
"The attempt failed because the" wing "also wanted to take over the party," added Meuthen.
He himself had previously attended network events, but later kept his distance from Höcke and other leaders of the group, which has now formally dissolved.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is now observing the network as a sure right-wing extremist endeavor.
The AfD is currently taking legal action against any possible observation of the entire party by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
The proceedings before the Cologne Administrative Court also deal with the question of what weight ideas and actors of the far-right current have in the AfD.
The domestic secret service has put down its current assessment of the AfD in a new report.
According to information from the German Press Agency, Höcke is by far the most frequently mentioned by all party members.
In the interview, Meuthen also criticized the recent trip to Moscow by co-chairman Tino Chrupalla.
The fact that he gave a speech at a conference at the invitation of the Russian Defense Ministry was just as "unwise" as the content of that speech.
Together with Weidel, Chrupalla forms the top team of the AfD in the federal election campaign.
Meuthen is a member of the European Parliament and is not running for the Bundestag.
When asked how long he would be party leader in view of the massive headwind from his own ranks and whether he might leave the AfD like the former chairmen Bernd Lucke and Frauke Petry, Meuthen replied: “Throwing it is not my style, I do that not me."
wal / dpa
