The co-chairwoman of the nationalist Alternative for Germany party said today she plans to leave it just two days after it made a strong showing in the country's elections.

Frauke Petry's announcement came as other politicians from the anti-migrant party gathered for their first meeting after their breakthrough.

Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won 12.6% of the vote in Sunday's election to win seats in the national parliament for the first time.

Ms Petry, its co-chairwoman since 2015, announced on Monday that she would not join its parliamentary group and other leaders urged her to leave the party altogether.

"It is clear that this step will follow," Ms Petry said on Tuesday in the eastern city of Dresden, in remarks reported by the dpa news agency.

Ms Petry's husband, Marcus Pretzell, the party leader in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and a regional politician there, said he is also leaving AfD.

AfD won 94 of the 709 seats in the new German parliament, including Ms Petry's.

It was not immediately clear whether any others would follow Ms Petry, who moved AfD's focus from opposing eurozone bailouts to migration after she took over in 2015 but has been increasingly sidelined in recent months.

Ms Petry has said she was aiming to make the AfD ready for government in 2021, and urged her party earlier this year to exclude members who expressed extremist views.

She said on Monday that "an anarchic party" can be successful in opposition but cannot eye a place in government, before storming out of a press conference and leaving other party leaders momentarily speechless.

Fellow AfD members appeared relatively unconcerned by Ms Petry's departure as they gathered in Berlin.

Asked whether other politicians will follow Ms Petry, co-leader Alexander Gauland said: "I hope not, but I can't look into people's heads."

Sunday's election left Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative bloc weakened but still easily the biggest group in parliament.

Mrs Merkel now faces a complicated task in forming a coalition, most likely with the pro-business Free Democrats and the traditionally left-leaning Greens.

Her partners in the outgoing government, the centre-left Social Democrats, say they will go into opposition after they lost substantial support in the vote.

Mrs Merkel also faces calls from her own allies for a more robust conservative image.</s>Alternative for Germany (AfD) defectors Frauke Petry and her husband Marcus Pretzell fed speculation on Wednesday that they might form a group to rival a party they now describe as overly "radicalized."

But Alice Weidel, who was elected co-leader of the party caucus on Tuesday evening, retorted that an AfD rival would be "doomed to failure."

Petry, 42, walked out on Weidel and two other AfD leaders, Alexander Gauland and Jörg Meuthen, at a post-election press conference in Berlin on Monday. She said that the party needed to take a more moderate and realistic approach, saying it was currently shaping up to be an ineffective "fundamental opposition."

Exiting the AfD

Both Petry and Pretzell on Tuesday said they would each quit various posts held as members of the four-year-old populist party, albeit without specifying when.

Petry (r.) just before distancing herself from Weidel, Gauland and Meuthen on Monday

Petry quit as AfD opposition leader in Saxony's assembly, but kept the new federal seat she won outright in Sunday's Bundestag election in Saxony's Osterz hill region, just south of Dresden.

On Wednesday, the Bundestag's website listed Petry as an independent (fraktionslos in German) member of parliament.

Directly-elected politicians in Germany are at liberty to change party affiliation without giving up their seats.

Pretzell, for his part, said he would drop his post as AfD opposition faction leader in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Earlier on Wednesday, Pretzell told told public broadcaster ZDF that the public should be prepared for a surprise: "We're being spoken to by many people outside and also inside the AfD."

He also hinted at a potential partnership with the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), which suffered losses to the AfD in Sunday's election and faces a political shake up.

The CSU's historical confinement to Bavaria (the CDU does not compete in Bavaria, the CSU only competes in Bavaria) left it "federally politically castrated," Pretzell said.

"We are conducting a number of talks at the moment," Pretzell added, adding that it could take several weeks before an outcome emerged.

Since Sunday's election, CSU chairman and Bavarian state premier Horst Seehofer has faced heavy internal criticism over his party's 10-percent slump in support.

Others threaten to follow

Thomas Hartung, a senior AfD official in Saxony, announced on Wednesday that he would be quitting his role as deputy chairman in the state.

Hartung said he saw two "irreconcilable streams in the AfD" and what he called a "witch hunt against independent thinkers." However, he also said that he would "naturally" remain a member of the party despite quitting his higher office.

Güllner: Far-right AfD likely to dismantle itself

The AfD in the northern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania also saw a shift this week, when four of its 18 parliamentarians formed a rival faction on Monday.

Domain name 'dieblauen.de' fuels speculation

The German news agency dpa quoted Petry on Wednesday as saying a web address "dieblauen.de" (translating as "the Blues" in German) was registered in her name. However, Petry told dpa that the term "Blues" was an idea, not necessarily a party name, and that she would comment further on this in due course.

"I don't want to say any more about that at this time," dpa quoted Petry as saying.

The domain name is registered in Petry's name, according to Denic, which manages Germany's .de domain. Denic records say that the last change to the domain's status was made this July.

Disintegration predicted

Prior to the Petry and Pretzell AfD exits, political analysts had already speculated that the far-right party — the first to enter the Bundestag in six decades — would disintegrate.

On election eve, Forsa polling institute chief Manfred Güllner predicted: "The AfD will dismantle itself."

Sectarian groups on the far right had always done so, he told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung newspaper last Saturday.

Güllner said the AfD, now present in opposition in 13 of Germany's regional assemblies, had shown itself not to be interested in "proper parliamentary work" from day to day, but rather in disputes on political direction.

AfD 'shedding its skin'

After Petry's press conference exit on Monday, Dresden political scientist Professor Hans Vorländer told public Deutschlandfunk radio that if Petry recruited 30 "loyal supporters" in the Bundestag she could forge her own group.

Vorländer: AfD 'shedding its skin'

Bundestag organizational rules require a minimum of 30 parliamentarians for formal recognition as a parliamentary faction.

Before Sunday's election, the AfD, which he described as a "collecting basin of the disgruntled" had camouflaged its inner turmoil, Vorländer said, but its bickering had now broken out into the open.

"That's a development that has been evident for a long time," he added. "The AfD is shedding its skin."

ipj/kms (dpa, AFP)</s>A majority of Germans have yet again voted for the globalist multiculturalist Islam-importing destroyer-in-chief of Germany and Europe: Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But this time a lot of Germans voted against her.

Europe has never been as committed to democracy as the United States. Its elites let people vote, but some issues they are not willing to allow to be decided by the masses. Thus, at quite an early stage, European liberals decided that immigration was too explosive an issue to be committed to the democratic process. Europeans were going to get mass immigration whether they wanted it or not, and anyone with reservations about that decision was deemed part of the “far right”.

This stratagem has mostly succeeded, at least temporarily. Few if any mainstream parties have been willing to oppose, or even question, mass non-European immigration. This left the large number of Europeans who wanted their countries to remain more or less as they have been, unrepresented, except by upstart parties that may or may not be “far right” on any issue other than immigration. The danger, obviously, is that by consigning the immigration issue to the “far right”, Europe’s elites may inadvertently, and needlessly, strengthen the otherwise insignificant elements that are, actually, far right.

In Germany, no mainstream party has been willing to stand up to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s importation of nearly a million immigrants and refugees, nearly all Muslims. So opposition has come from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which was founded in 2013 as a Euro-skeptic party, but now has taken on the immigration issue. Germany’s national election took place today, and the main story line [from the Star Tribune] is AfD’s strong showing:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel won a fourth term Sunday, but now faces the tricky prospect of forming a coalition with two disparate new partners after voters weakened her conservatives and a nationalist, anti-migrant party surged into parliament.

Merkel’s center-left challenger, Martin Schulz, conceded that his Social Democrats had suffered a “crushing election defeat”, with projections showing the party’s worst performance in post-World War II Germany.

The biggest winner was the four-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD. It finished third after a campaign that centered on shrill criticism of Merkel and her decision in 2015 to allow large numbers of migrants into Germany, but also harnessed wider discontent with established politicians.

AfD got 13% of the vote. Germany’s “discontent with established politicians” was reflected in the fact that both Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats saw their vote totals decline substantially.

So is AfD really a far right party? The left-wing BBC bitterly opposes anti-immigration parties like AfD and tries to put the party in a bad light, for the most part unsuccessfully:

AfD also adopted some of Pegida’s anti-establishment rhetoric, for example the slogan “Lügenpresse” (“lying press”), which has echoes of the Nazi era.

Apparently you can’t question the establishment press without being a Nazi. Some American liberals say the same thing, but no one believes them.

Germany must reintroduce permanent border controls and the EU’s external borders must be “completely shut”, AfD says. …

AfD argues that Germany must set up a new border police force. Frauke Petry, who stepped aside from the AfD leadership earlier this year, even said German police should “if necessary” shoot at migrants seeking to enter the country illegally.

This tells us what we already knew, that AfD is anti-immigration. The BBC evidently considers the idea of shooting at people trying illegally to enter Germany shocking. But if people insist on entering a country despite that country’s laws, isn’t shooting them “if necessary” the last resort? Isn’t that why border guards are pretty much always armed? A country whose border guards could do no more than wave at foreigners and implore them not to enter the country would not – to put it mildly – have secure borders.

AfD says that “Islam does not belong to Germany”. …

AfD would ban foreign funding of mosques in Germany, ban the burka (full-body veil) and the Muslim call to prayer, and put all imams through a state vetting procedure. …

Those proposals wouldn’t fly in the U.S., but they cannot fairly be considered extreme. AfD has, however, had some unsavory moments unrelated to immigration:

Mr[Alexander] Gauland [an AfD leader] drew criticism for declaring that Germans should be “proud” of their soldiers in both world wars. While SS units were notorious for German atrocities in World War Two, the regular armed forces also committed many war crimes.

Earlier another top AfD politician, Björn Höcke, caused outrage by condemning the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. He told supporters that Germans were the “only people in the world who planted a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital”.</s>Back in the early 1990s, a few years after the Berlin Wall came down, I went back to the house in Dresden where my father was born. The house was on the outskirts so my father and grandmother survived the bombing – they got the last train out of Dresden before the Red Army arrived. The family I found there had been there since 1945. They’d been expelled from Silesia when Stalin handed the region over to Poland, and had ended up in Dresden along with so many other displaced Germans. They’d been living there for half a century, three generations under the same roof. They didn’t own this house – like almost everything in East Germany, it had been owned by ‘the people’ (i.e. the government). They were excited by their new future in a reunited Germany, the ‘blooming landscapes’ Helmut Kohl had promised them. I wondered what would become of them. Ten years later, I went back again to find out.

What had become of this East German family and the dormitory town they lived in was a pretty good paradigm for what’s been happening in Eastern Germany as whole. The town centre had been spruced up, the infrastructure was brand new, but there wasn’t much going on – it felt like a museum. The house was a lot smarter too, kitted out with all the latest mod cons, but the man who’d greeted me ten years before was out of sorts – his daughter had gone west and he was unemployed. His daughter was one of the winners of German Reunification, he was one of the losers, and he knew it. His life would have been better if the Wall had never come down.

I thought about that family when the German election results came in last Sunday. I was at the German Embassy in Belgrave Square, surrounded by youthful, successful Germans. A good many of them were from the East. They spoke perfect English (of course), far better than my schoolboy German. Their young lives were full of promise, and it was all thanks to reunification. But what about their parents, back East? What prospects do they have?

Last Sunday’s election results showed that, a generation since the Wall came down, there are still two Germanies. Eleven per cent of West Germans voted for Alternative für Deutschland, Germany’s anti-immigration party. Twice as many voted AfD in the East. Most West Germans voted for centrist parties – Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats or Martin Schulz’s soft-left Social Democrats. In the East, far fewer voters backed the SPD, or Merkel’s CDU.

It’s not just about immigration. Die Linke, Germany’s hard left party, polled more than twice as many votes in the East than in the West. Left or right, the message is clear – an awful lot of East Germans have lost faith in the centrist parties which have ruled the Bundesrepublik since the war.

Relatively speaking, German Reunification has been a remarkable success. In 1989, the German ‘Democratic’ Republic was bankrupt. While West Germany had enjoyed forty years of prosperity, forty years of Marxist-Leninism had brought the Eastern half of Germany to its knees. You had to travel here to witness the devastation of a nation where private property had been virtually abolished, where private enterprise was practically prohibited: nothing worth buying in the shops; nothing in the cafes worth eating; desolate, deserted farms; filthy decrepit factories; huge housing estates in the middle of nowhere with hardly anyone left in them. Meanwhile, the Western half of Germany had become Europe’s powerhouse, the envy of the free world. It was the most dramatic example you can imagine of the comparative merits of despotic communism and democratic capitalism. The East German government had simply walked away, and left West Germany to clear up the mess.

A generation later, Eastern Germany is functioning again, and its regeneration is a testament to the hard work and ingenuity of all Germans – East and West. To resurrect an entire country in half a lifetime is an incredible achievement, but to restore the fortunes of its people will take at least half a lifetime yet. Capitalism is the only solution for East German woes and in large parts of East Germany it’s already working, but it’s a blunt instrument and its results have been uneven. Berlin is booming, Leipzig has been transformed and the Baltic Coast is beautiful, but the small towns where no-one goes are full of people who’ve been left behind, and a lot of those people feel abandoned by the political establishment. These are the people who’ve voted for Die Linke, and are now voting AfD.

What will become of these forgotten people? For middle aged men my age, probably nothing. The man who lives in my father’s old house is too old to retrain. He’ll never work again. But the younger generation is a worry. They’ve too much life ahead of them to sit around reminiscing about the old days, when the state organised every aspect of their lives, from Kindergarten to Altersheim. West Germans will be hoping the mini Wirtschaftswunder of Berlin and Leipzig somehow works its wonders on the forgotten towns of Mecklenburg and Brandenburg – and soon. Otherwise, I fear the fatherland I still think of as my Heimat may have more than a mere protest vote on its hands.
Former members of the Alternative für Deutschland party Frauke Petry and Marcus Pretzell may create a new party.