section_path: History/Founding
section_name: Founding
paragraph_text: Founding
  
  The party was founded on 6 February 2013. On 14 April 2013, the AfD announced its presence to the wider public when it held its first convention in Berlin, elected the party leadership, and adopted a party platform. Bernd Lucke, the entrepreneur Frauke Petry and Konrad Adam were elected as speakers. AfD's federal board also chose Alexander Gauland, Roland Klaus, and Patricia Casale as its three deputy speakers. The party elected the treasurer Norbert Stenzel and the three assessors Irina Smirnova, Beatrix Diefenbach, and Wolf-Joachim Schünemann. The economist Joachim Starbatty, along with Jörn Kruse, Helga Luckenbach, Dirk Meyer, and Roland Vaubel, were elected to the party's scientific advisory board. Between 31 March and 12 May 2013 AfD founded affiliates in all 16 states of Germany in order to participate in the federal elections. On 15 June 2013 the Young Alternative for Germany was founded in Darmstadt as the AfD's youth organisation. During the British prime minister David Cameron 's visit to Germany in April 2013, the British Conservative Party was reported to have contacted both AfD and the Free Voters to discuss possible cooperation, supported by the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group of the European Parliament. In June 2013 Bernd Lucke gave a question and answer session organized by the Conservative Party-allied Bruges Group think tank in Portcullis House, London. In a detailed report in the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in April 2013, the paper's Berlin-based political correspondent Majid Sattar revealed that the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and CDU had conducted opposition research to blunt the growth and attraction of AfD.
  
  Advocating the abolition of the euro, AfD took a more radical stance than the Free Voters. The Pirate Party Germany opposed any coalition with AfD at their 2013 spring convention. The AfD's initial supporters were the same prominent economists, business leaders, and journalists who had supported the Electoral Alternative 2013, including former members of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), who had previously challenged the constitutionality of the German government's eurozone policies at the Federal Constitutional Court. AfD did not regard itself as a splinter party from the CDU, as its early membership also contained a former state leader from the Free Democratic Party and members of the Federation of Independent Voters, a pressure group of independents and small business owners.