Germany, says Andreas Kalbitz, is a sleeping beauty that is about to be kissed awake. The handsome prince entering her chamber is the Alternative for Germany, a populist hard-right party that has thoroughly disrupted German politics.
“The AfD is the fresh wind that will put this country back on its feet again,” says Mr Kalbitz, to murmurs of approval from the burghers at Höncke’s Old Pub in Königs Wusterhausen, a small town in Brandenburg, who have gathered on a sweltering evening to hear him campaign.
Mr Kalbitz leads the AfD in Brandenburg, the region that surrounds Germany’s capital Berlin. It is a happy hunting-ground for the AfD: if polls are accurate, it could emerge as the most popular party in regional elections on September 1, even beating the left-of-centre Social Democrats which have governed this corner of East Germany since reunification in 1990.
Two other eastern regions, Saxony and Thuringia, are also choosing new parliaments this autumn and, as in Brandenburg, the AfD is set to make big gains. That is a major problem for the eastern political elite. Building effective coalitions in a fragmented landscape increasingly dominated by the AfD, which all the other parties refuse to work with, will become a lot harder.
Mr Kalbitz says parties like Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the SPD have let down the people of the former communist east. “There has been a catastrophic loss of trust in the established parties and the AfD benefits from that,” he says. “People are attracted to clear positions and lively debate, and that’s what they find in the AfD.”
His confidence masks an uncomfortable truth about the current state of his party. The AfD is in turmoil, inflamed by a long-running power struggle between relative moderates and radicals. Played out across Germany, it has featured smear campaigns, feuds on social media and public denunciations that have left deep scars and a trail of recriminations.
On one side of the conflict are the more conventional conservatives, many of them disgruntled Christian Democrats who abandoned the CDU in protest at Ms Merkel’s liberal policies, especially on immigration. On the other is the Wing, a hardline group led by Mr Kalbitz and Björn Höcke, one of Germany’s most controversial politicians. A firebrand whose rhetorical style has been likened — even by people in his own party — to that of Joseph Goebbels, Mr Höcke, who is the AfD’s leader in Thuringia, is adored in the east and loathed in large parts of the west, where he is seen as a dangerous nationalist.
The outcome of the power struggle will determine the AfD’s fate. Will it remain a broad church uniting economic liberals with patriotic nationalists that could one day form coalitions with other conservative parties like the CDU and even enter government? Or will it continue to drift to the right, ending up as a fringe protest party that is beyond the pale for mainstream voters?
Jörg Meuthen, the AfD’s national leader, denies talk of a civil war. “There are people with different views, and we argue more than those in other parties do — but that’s democracy,” he says. “It would be weird if everyone in a party had exactly the same opinion.”
But some observers see it differently. “With the AfD, there is a clear risk of a hostile takeover [by the far-right],” says Florian Hartleb, a political scientist and author of The Hour of the Populists. “It will then be impossible for anyone else to form coalitions with them, and a lot of moderate voters will be scared away.”
The elections in the east could prove a turning point in this regard. The Wing sees eastern Germany as its base, so if the AfD beats all the other parties in Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia, Mr Höcke and his faction will take sole credit for the victory.
“It will be a vindication of the Wing’s radical rightwing course,” says Matthias Quent, head of the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in the eastern city of Jena and an expert on far-right extremism. He expects the Wing, which Mr Meuthen says already commands the support of 20 per cent of AfD voters, to “vastly expand its power base within the AfD” in the aftermath of the autumn elections.
Already, top politicians in the Wing are hinting that a strong result this autumn should silence their critics in western Germany who urge restraint. “I’m sick of being told what to do by people who are lucky to get 8-9 per cent in their own regions,” says Mr Kalbitz. “It’s like in business: success makes you sexy. In business it’s revenues, profits and margins, and in politics it’s your election results.”
Alarm bells are already ringing for the more moderate members. “If I have a party that does well in three elections in the east and is associated with the Wing and Höcke, then this party risks becoming unelectable in the west,” says Frank-Christian Hansel, who sits for the AfD in the Berlin parliamentary assembly.
His fear is that at the next regional poll in the west — in the prosperous city-state of Hamburg in February — the AfD could end up losing its six seats. “And then,” he says, “you just enter this downward spiral.”
The AfD was founded in 2013 as a Eurosceptic party opposed to the Greek bailout. As the eurozone’s debt crises eased, its poll ratings sank. But it was given a new lease of life by Ms Merkel’s decision to let nearly 1m refugees into Germany in 2015. Harnessing a huge public backlash against the influx, it adopted a stridently anti-immigration, anti-Islam rhetoric which resonated widely with conservative voters.
The AfD quickly established itself as Germany’s most successful rightwing political organisation since the second world war. It now has seats in all of the country’s 16 regional parliaments and is the largest opposition party in the Bundestag, which it first entered in 2017.
The party seemed to have history on its side. Britain voted for Brexit, America elected Donald Trump, illiberal democracies were on the march in Hungary and Poland and Italy was soon to have a populist government. The AfD was part of a global nationalist, nativist, authoritarian wave.
But since its inception it has gradually drifted further to the right. Authorities have long been concerned about the increasing ties between parts of the AfD and the Identitarian Movement, a radical group virulently opposed to Islam, immigration and multiculturalism.
“AfD regional associations are being systematically infiltrated by identitarians who are determined to make the party more radical than it already is,” says Mr Hartleb.
Mr Hansel pins the blame on the German press, which frequently runs stories on Mr Höcke and the activities of the Wing. “If everyone always says that we’re a far-right party, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — people start joining who are attracted to that image,” he says. These could include former supporters of fringe organisations like the Republicans or the neo-Nazi NPD.
For years, AfD officials tried to counter this by drawing a cordon sanitaire around the party, avoiding any association with known neo-Nazis and identitarians and coming down hard on members who espoused extremist views.
But those efforts always seemed halfhearted at best. The party has so far failed in its efforts to expel prominent radicals, including Mr Höcke. Meanwhile his stature has only grown, and his behaviour become more brazen. Following the killing of a German man in the eastern town of Chemnitz last year by a suspected asylum seeker, Mr Höcke, as well as other senior AfD figures, walked alongside football hooligans, members of the extreme anti-Islamic Pegida and neo-Nazis in a “silent protest”. AfD moderates were horrified.
A few months later, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, announced the Wing posed enough of a threat to the country’s constitutional order that it would start formally spying on them. There were “increasing indications” that it was an “extremist” organisation bent on “excluding, disparaging and disenfranchising foreigners, migrants, especially Muslims, and political opponents” as well as “relativising historical Nazism”.
Mr Kalbitz, who once served as a German army paratrooper, is typical of the nationalists who have made a home for themselves in the AfD. He is a former member of the Republicans, which for years was monitored by the BfV. He also once took part in a summer camp of the Homeland-loyal German Youth, a neo-Nazi group that was banned in 2009. In a report on the AfD, the BfV cited a 2017 speech by Mr Kalbitz in which he called the AfD “the last evolutionary chance for this country”, adding: “After that, it’s ‘helmets on!’”
The BfV’s suspicions did not deter Mr Höcke, whose growing reputation in the east was on full display at this summer’s annual jamboree of the Wing, held this year in the Thuringian town of Leinefelde. A video showed him feeding sheep, singing the German anthem and jogging in the forest. The man himself then slowly processed into the hall, greeted by hundreds of fans waving German flags and chanting his name.
“It was grotesque,” says Mr Hansel. “You could see individuals just merging into the crowd and starting to bawl. But we are supposed to be the party of the intellect, of common sense.”
Mr Höcke then gave a speech in which he attacked the AfD’s national leadership. Mr Meuthen, who had always protected Mr Höcke from the abortive effort to expel him from the party, was furious, texting him that he considered the speech “divisive”.
A few days later, about 100 AfD functionaries signed a joint appeal accusing Mr Höcke of damaging party unity and lambasting the “personality cult” that had grown up around him. “We say clearly”, the appeal said, “the AfD is and won’t ever be a Björn Höcke party!”
It wasn’t just the Höcke speech in Leinefelde they were objecting to. In the past few months, a number of bitter disputes have broken out in AfD regional branches in the western states of North Rhine-Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein and Bavaria, pitting moderates against members of the Wing. One leading member of the AfD’s national executive, Kay Gottschalk, last month said the Wing’s antics had left a “trail of destruction” throughout the west.
One of the most prominent signatories of the “Appeal of the 100” was Georg Pazderski, a conservative who is leader of the AfD in Berlin. “We wanted to draw a line in the sand — to say, ‘This far and no further’,” he says. “We told Höcke — just stick to Thuringia, don’t interfere in other regional branches of the party. Do your homework and we’ll do ours.”
Mr Kalbitz denies the Wing is trying to take over the AfD. “The party could get to 20-30 per cent across Germany, up from around 12 per cent now,” he says. “But we can only reach our full potential if we remain a broad church, with leaders who appeal to different target audiences.”
Others think the AfD will only achieve its full potential if it more actively resists the rise of the Wing. “A lot of people will quit the party if they have the feeling we’re not confronting Höcke,” says Mr Hansel. “It’s an existential issue for the AfD.”
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