The Alternative for Germany's (AfD) party congress voted on Sunday in favor of allowing national spokeswoman and leader of its Saxony branch, Frauke Petry, to run as a candidate for the state of Saxony in this year's federal elections.

A proposal to stop her from running was put forward by a wing of the AfD who accuse her of splitting party ranks. Previously, Petry refused to support two disgraced party members over comments they made concerning the Holocaust at an event in January. Her detractors also claimed that the charges of perjury against her have damaged the party's reputation.

Read more: Ten things you need to know about the AfD

However, at Sunday's AfD party congress in the eastern German town of Dohna, 33 delegates for the nationalist party rejected the proposal to ban her from running, while 19 voted in favor.

Watch video 03:24 Share #GermanyDecides: A look at the AfD in Dresden Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/2ep0H #GermanyDecides: A look at the AfD in Dresden

Petry remains the top candidate on the AfD's list of candidates in Saxony for a seat in the Bundestag, giving her a very good chance of entering Germany's lower house following September's federal election.

Petry the target of anger as AfD support wanes

Petry, a trained chemist and businesswoman, entered politics to help AfD founder Bernd Lucke establish the party as a mainstream political force in 2013. Her ultra-nationalist, anti-Muslim and anti-immigration politics proved to be a boon for the AfD, with support reaching a record high of 15 percent last September.

However, the party has seen a recent slump in support in this year's state elections, thanks in no small part to a series of scandals that have plagued prominent members.

Read more: Germany's anti-immigrant AfD party picks top candidates

In January, AfD lawmaker Jens Maier declared that Germany's "guilt cult" about the Holocaust was over during an event hosted by the AfD's youth organization in Dresden - the sort of statement generally designed to play well with Germany's neo-Nazis.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alexander Gauland Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team's defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch - but people would not want "someone like Boateng as a neighbor." He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: "We can't be blackmailed by children's eyes."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alice Weidel Alice Weidel generally plays the role of "voice of reason" for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians "pigs" and "puppets of the victorious powers in World War II. Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Frauke Petry German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must "use firearms if necessary" to "prevent illegal border crossings." Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Björn Höcke The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year - leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Beatrix von Storch Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts - but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Marcus Pretzell Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote "These are Merkel's dead," shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andre Wendt The member of parliament in Germany's eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andre Poggenburg Poggenburg, head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alexander Gauland - again ... During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be "disposed of" back to Anatolia. The German term, "entsorgen," raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks ... and again Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany's responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andreas Kalbitz The Brandenburg state AfD chief admitted in 2019 to attending a 2007 rally in Greece by the ultranationalist Golden Dawn party at which a swastika flag was raised. "Der Spiegel" had published a leaked report by the German embassy in Athens naming him as one of "14 neo-Nazis" who arrived from Germany for the far-right rally. Kalbitz released a statement saying he took part out of "curiosity." Author: Dagmar Breitenbach



At the same conference, the AfD's leader in the eastern German state of Thuringia, Björn Höcke, called for an end to the culture of Shoah remembrance, attacking Germany's national Holocaust memorial and the country's devotion to teaching its citizens about Nazi genocide. Höcke said that German history was being made "appalling and laughable" and that "these stupid politics of coming to grips with the past cripple us - we need nothing other than a 180-degree reversal on the politics of remembrance."

Read more: 'Höcke's apology is part of a strategy,' expert says

Petry backed the expulsion of both Maier and Höcke from the party. Despite that, Maier was elected to the second position of the party's candidate list in Saxony for Bundestag seats. The AfD did decide to remove Höcke from the party's ranks, although an arbitration committee of the party is still scheduled to rule on that request.

Amid all the backlash directed at her from within the party, Petry announced in April that she would not be standing as the AfD's lead candidate in the federal elections. Instead, nationalist lawmaker Alexander Gauland and economist Alice Weidel will head the party into September's vote.