Germany’s anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) is scheduled to wrap up a fractious party congress today by choosing the team to lead it into Germany’s September general election, after it dramatically sidelined its most prominent personality.
The AfD’s telegenic co-leader Frauke Petry had already announced last week she would not join the campaign squad, after weeks of bitter infighting between populists and more radical, hard-right forces.
Petry, 41, a former chemist who is pregnant with her fifth child, was handed a further setback on Saturday at the gathering in the western city of Cologne, which drew tens of thousands of protesters.
The about 600 delegates rejected her call to adopt a more moderate-sounding realpolitik program intended to shut down the party’s more extremist voices, including those who have attacked Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture.
Top-selling daily Bild called delegates’ decision to not even debate her motion a “crushing blow” for Petry, who expressed bitterness on the sidelines of the meeting.
“I will step aside during the campaign, as that’s what the party congress apparently wants,” Petry said, while pledging to remain party co-chairwoman “for now.”
“As long as the party is not willing to say in what direction it wants to go, a team will have to lead the campaign that can deal with this indecision better than I can,” she said.
The AfD has seen its support plummet as the refugee influx to Germany has slowed in recent months after German Chancellor Angela Merkel let in more than 1 million asylum seekers since 2015.
The party, now represented in 11 of Germany’s 16 states, aims to sign off on a program that would pave the way for it to enter the national parliament for the first time in its four-year history.
It includes calls to stop family unification of refugees already in Germany, strip immigrants convicted of “significant crimes” of their German passports and declare Islam incompatible with German culture.
Petry’s chief rival, 76-year-old Alexander Gauland, a hardline defector from Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, had urged delegates to defeat her realpolitik motion, calling it “divisive.”
However, even Gauland, who was widely mentioned as a candidate to join the AfD campaign team, expressed regret that Petry, who is very popular with the party’s base, will not be front-and-center on the campaign trail.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese