BERLIN — A leader of the nationalist Alternative for Germany has laid open differences inside the party after it surged to third place in Germany’s election, announcing she won’t join its new parliamentary caucus.

Frauke Petry is the co-chairwoman of Alternative for Germany, or AfD, but has increasingly been sidelined by other leaders over recent months. AfD was particularly successful in Petry’s home region of Saxony in Sunday’s election, and Petry herself won a seat.

Petry has said she wants to make the party ready for government in 2021, while others have made clear their priority is no-holds-barred opposition.

Petry said at a news conference Monday with other leaders: “An anarchic party … can be successful in opposition, but it cannot make voters a credible offer for government.”

Petry said she wouldn’t join AfD’s parliamentary caucus and walked out without taking questions.

Petry has differed over strategy with the AfD’s campaign headliners, Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland, who she has suggested aren’t doing enough to attract middle-of-the-road voters to the party. Founded in 2013 to oppose financial bailouts of other euro-area countries, the AfD focused its campaign on vilifying Merkel for her open-borders refugee policy.

“I have decided that I won’t belong to the AfD caucus in the German Bundestag, but will sit for the time being as an individual member,” Petry, 42, told reporters.

Before walking out, she said the AfD needs to start a “conservative turnaround” with the aim of joining Germany’s government after the next scheduled election in 2021.

Petry, who won 37.4 percent of the vote in her district in the eastern state of Saxony, said she’ll nonetheless “continue to be active in making policy.” It wasn’t immediately clear whether any other members of the AfD’s 94-member caucus would join in her in sitting off on her own in parliament.

“A high share of votes for the AfD was predictable from the polls and we can continue to assume that the AfD will not influence government politics in Germany for the foreseeable future,” Commerzbank analysts including currency strategist Ulrich Leuchtmann said in a note to clients.

Petry’s move sheds light on discord within the lower house’s youngest party that remained below the surface during the campaign. While support for Merkel’s Christian Democratic-led bloc fell to the lowest since 1949, she won a mandate for a fourth term and no other party in parliament wants to ally with the AfD.

In an interview with the Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper before the election, Petry said “middle-class voters are turning away” from the AfD because some of its members are making headlines that tarnish the party’s reputation.

Her criticism followed comments by Gauland, who said Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee commissioner, who is of Turkish descent, should be “disposed of” in Anatolia, a comment Merkel called racist.

Gauland, a former member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, also said Germans have a right to take pride in the achievements of German soldiers in the 20th century’s two world wars.

With files from The Associated Press and Bloomberg News</s>While fighting for a seat in the German parliament over the last few months, Sergej Tschernow, a candidate for the right-wing Alternative for Germany, or AfD, knew that he could only rely on a few media outlets to give his party the coverage it craves: the Russian ones.

“They show our points of view in full,” he told TIME on Election Day, Sunday Sept. 24, when the AfD became the first far-right movement to enter into the German legislature since the end of World War II, winning a remarkable 13% of the vote and going from zero to more than 90 seats in a chamber of 631 lawmakers.

The party's rise has been caused by a range of factors, not least the widespread frustrations with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose political party, the Christian Democratic Union, had one of the worst showings in its history on Sunday. It won only 33% of the vote – most likely enough to secure Merkel a fourth term in office, but hardly the commanding lead the CDU anticipated.

With its nativist stance against immigration and its attacks against the European Union, the AfD has managed to siphon a lot of votes away from Merkel by harnessing the anti-establishment sentiment that has swept through Western democracies in recent years. But one uniquely German reason for the party's success has been the broad support it enjoys among the Russian emigrant community — bolstered by the noisy partisan reporting of Kremlin-backed broadcasters, whose reports on the elections reached millions of German voters through satellite dishes, on cable and online.

Who really votes for AfD

The AfD has estimated that about a third of its support comes from Russian-speaking voters, several million of whom have settled in Germany since the 1980s; they now make up as much as 5% of the population. On Sunday night, one of the leaders of the AfD, a vocally anti-immigrant and nationalist party, appeared to concede – somewhat paradoxically – that its core constituents are themselves immigrants.

“Take a look at who really votes for the AfD, and where we have the strongest numbers,” Jörg Meuthen, the AfD party whip, told Chancellor Merkel and other leading politicians during a post-election debate on German television. “It is precisely among these migrants, among people with an immigrant background who lead integrated lives here and who cannot believe what is happening to this country.”

While he did not specifically identify the Russian community, his party has devoted substantial resources to swaying this group of voters during the race this year. It translated its fliers and brochures into Russian, ran information stands and outreach programs in Russian-speaking neighborhoods, and catered its platform to the interests of this community. Among the AfD's core pledges on foreign policy is to lift German sanctions on Russia and seek warmer relations with President Vladimir Putin.

“The AfD really looked after the Russian Germans like no other party,” says Alexander Reiser, the founder of the Vision Union of Emigrants, a Berlin-based advocacy group that seeks to defend the interests of the Russian-German community. “It is the only party that said to the Russians, ‘You are part of the German nation,’” says Reiser, who does not himself support the AfD.

Kremlin media have meanwhile portrayed the party in a decidedly favorable light. “They don’t interpret. They don’t criticize us. They don’t ask provocative questions to get something out of us,” Tschernow tells TIME outside of a polling station in his district on the outskirts of Hannover. “From our point of view, they are objectively showing events," he added. "So we love them."

While in some ways subtler than the hacks and leaks that Russia allegedly used to influence the U.S. elections last year, the role of Russian state media in Germany suggests that Moscow has a variety of tricks in its soft-power toolkit, and it tends to choose the one that best fits its target. Through social media, radio and television broadcasts, news outlets that are sponsored by the Russian government have consistently offered viewers an alternative view of German reality, often depicting life under Chancellor Angela Merkel as dangerous, depraved and undemocratic while airing uncritical or laudatory reports about the AfD.

At the same time, the Kremlin-backed media has sought to depict Germany's Russian-speaking population as part of what Putin has sometimes called the “Russian world.” The most famous example of this type of outreach took place early last year, with a scandal involving a girl named Lisa.

The case of 'our Lisa'

In January 2016, Russian state television began airing alarming reports about an ethnic Russian girl named Lisa, who had allegedly been kidnapped and gang raped by a group of Muslim refugees in Berlin. The reports were quickly debunked as inaccurate by German police and other officials, who found evidence that the girl had concocted the story.

But senior Russian diplomats continued to accuse the Berlin authorities of staging a cover-up. Referring to the alleged rape victim as “our Lisa,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Moscow at the end of January 2016 that such cases must not be “swept under the carpet.” The Russian embassy in London chimed in a few days later , posting this remark in English on its official Twitter account: “German government threw their country under feet of migrants like a rug, now try wipe their crimes under carpet.”

Such statements of support from Moscow, as well as the coverage of the Lisa case on Russian state television, helped to galvanize the Russian community in Germany against Chancellor Merkel. Across the country, members of this community staged dozens of protests over what became known as the Lisa affair, including one massive demonstration outside Merkel’s offices in Berlin. “It was then that we saw how Russian propaganda works on these groups,” says Olaf Kuehl, an official in the Berlin legislature who handles outreach to the Russian community. “Even if they have all the channels available, they choose to watch the Russian ones, such as RT,” he says, referring to the Kremlin-funded network formerly known as Russia Today. “That’s how the influence gets in.”

During the next elections to the Berlin legislature, which were in Sept. 2016, the impact of that influence seemed clear to Kuehl and other observers. The AfD wound up with 14% of the vote, an unheard-of result for a far-right force in one of Germany’s most liberal cities – and only a few points behind Merkel’s party. The main pockets of support for the right wing turned out to be in the largely Russian-speaking neighborhoods in the east of the capital, especially the district of Marzahn-Hellersdorf , where the AfD got around 23% of the vote.

It was around this time that the AfD’s cooperation with the Russian community began in earnest, says Tschernow, who formally joined the movement in March 2016. A native of St. Petersburg who immigrated to Germany in 1994, Tschernow is one of at least eight native Russian speakers who ran on the AfD party ticket around the country. Like a lot of the Russian diaspora in Germany, he did not take an active interest in politics before the migration crisis of 2015. That summer and fall, Merkel allowed nearly a million refugees, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, to apply for asylum in Germany. The backlash to this decision was fierce across the German political spectrum, and Merkel’s approval ratings went into sharp decline, reaching a five-year low of around 45% in Sept. 2016.

The crisis also gave the AfD a major boost in the polls, and immigrants from the former Soviet Union proved to be among the most receptive to its message against immigration from the Muslim world. “The fear of Islamism runs deep among Russian Germans,” says Reiser, the community leader in Berlin. “And this fear was stirred up by the images shown on Russian television, which depicted [the migration crisis] as a catastrophe of Europe being flooded by migrants.”

The AfD thus had no difficulty in attracting Russian-speakers not only to join the party but also to run for office. In the region of Lower Saxony, for instance, three out of the party’s top 12 candidates for parliament were native Russian speakers, including Tschernow, who campaigned in a predominantly Russian-speaking neighborhood in the east of Hannover. Though he failed to win a seat in the parliament on Sunday, he says the number of Russian candidates on the AfD ticket marked a turn in his community's political awakening. “It showed that the party trusts us at the highest level to represent them.”

No less important for the Russian wing of the party are the direct contacts that AfD leadership developed with powerful figures in Moscow. In the fall of 2015, Alexander Gauland, who led the AfD ticket in Sunday’s elections, met in St. Petersburg with members of Putin’s political party, United Russia. He also sat down during that visit with the pro-Kremlin billionaire Konstantin Malofeev, who has been known to advance Moscow’s foreign policy interests in Europe. “The idea was to listen to Russian interests, Russian complaints about Western policy, to follow their thinking,” Gauland told the Bloomberg news agency at the time.

Another leader of the AfD, Frauke Petry, traveled to Moscow in February of this year to meet with members of the Russian parliament, including Vyacheslav Volodin, the chamber’s speaker, who previously served as Putin’s deputy chief of staff. The meeting raised alarm in the German media over possible collusion between the Kremlin and the AfD, both of which have fervently denied such allegations.

"We never interfere in the political life and the political processes of other countries,” Putin said in May, when Merkel travelled to his residence in Sochi in part to complain about signs of Russian meddling in the German elections. During that meeting, Merkel raised the Lisa affair in particular, as well as other misleading coverage of German politics shown on Russian state TV. If such incidents were to continue, Merkel said, the German government would take “decisive action” in response.

Tschernow believes her intervention had an impact. Although Russian state media continued giving favorable coverage to the AfD after Merkel confronted Putin, Kremlin broadcasters stopped short of giving the party as much airtime as it wanted. “They could have had some special reports, a series of reportage, for instance,” he says. "But there wasn't that kind of special support."

To get his message across to Russian voters, Tschernow still had to spend the weeks before the election driving around with a ladder in the back of his Audi station wagon, hanging AfD posters as high on the lampposts as he could. Among his favorites is a placard that shows a woman in traditional Muslim dress next to the caption, “Islam does not belong in Germany.”

That message, he admits, is not likely to improve social harmony in his district of Hannover, where Tschernow and his fellow Russians live among other migrant communities, among them Turkish people who settled in Germany in the 1970s and ‘80s, as well as newer arrivals from Syria, Iraq and northern Africa. But his aim in politics is not to build bridges among these groups. “We don’t talk to them,” he says. “Given the choice, we find it better to talk to people like us.”

How that approach will work during debates within the German parliament remains to be seen. As the third-most popular party in the land, the AfD will now become a prominent voice in the opposition to Merkel. During a press conference in Berlin on Monday, another one of the party's leaders, Alice Weidel, said that its first order of business in parliament will be to launch an investigation against the Chancellor for violating the constitution during the migration crisis of 2015.

As that confrontation unfolds, the AfD can expect to maintain the sympathy of at least one powerful ally. “The Russian media will always report what we say, and Russia Today will rebroadcast it in German,” says Tschernow. “So no one will be able to sweep our opinions under the rug. That’s how we see it.”</s>German chancellor Angela Merkel has won a fourth term, 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.

Ms Merkel's centre-left challenger, Martin Schulz, conceded his Social Democrats had suffered a "crushing election defeat", with projections showing the party's worst performance in post-Second World War Germany.

He vowed to take his party, the junior partner in Ms Merkel's outgoing "grand coalition" of Germany's traditionally dominant parties, into opposition.

"We have a mandate to form a new government, and no government can be formed against us," Ms Merkel told cheering supporters. She added that it wasn't a "matter of course" to finish first after 12 years in power, and that the past four years were "extremely challenging".

Stressing that "we live in stormy times" internationally, she declared: "I have the intention of achieving a stable government in Germany."

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

One of AfD's leaders, Alice Weidel, said it will provide "constructive opposition". But co-leader Alexander Gauland struck a harsher tone, vowing that "we will take our country back" and promising to "chase" Ms Merkel.

Final results showed Ms Merkel's Christian Democratic Union and their Bavaria-only allies, the Christian Social Union, winning 33% of the vote - down from 41.5% four years ago.

Mr Schulz's Social Democrats were trailing far behind, with 20.5% support, down from 25.7% in 2013 and undercutting their previous post-war low of 23% eight years ago.

Demonstrators protest against the nationalist Alternative for Germany Party, AfD, after parliament elections in Frankfurt, Germany, last night. Pic: AP

AfD won 12.6% of the vote. It was followed by the election's other big winner - the pro-business Free Democratic Party, which returned to parliament after a four-year break with 10.7%.

The Left Party took 9.2% of the vote, coming slightly ahead of the traditionally left-leaning Greens who won 8.9%, completing a parliament that now has six caucuses rather than the previous four.

Thousands took to the streets to protest outside its headquarters in Berlin and in other cities across Germany last night.

All mainstream parties have ruled out working with AfD and Ms Merkel's conservatives will not form a coalition with the Left Party. That means two politically plausible governments are mathematically feasible: continuing the "grand coalition" or a combination of Ms Merkel's Union bloc, the Free Democrats and Greens.

That alliance is known as a "Jamaica" coalition because the parties' colours match those of the Caribbean nation's flag.

The Social Democrats were adamant on Sunday night that they would no't continue to serve under Ms Merkel. "It is completely clear that the role the voters have given us is as the opposition," Mr Schulz said.

Referring to AfD's third-place finish, he said "there cannot be a far-right party leading the opposition in Germany".

Reiner Haseloff, the conservative governor of eastern Saxony-Anhalt state, said it would be wrong to ignore AfD's strong result.

"We need an answer - there must be no democratic alternative to our right," he added. "As long as it is there, we haven't completely done our homework."

AfD is the first party to the right of the conservatives to enter parliament in 60 years. Hundreds of demonstrators descended upon the club where the nationalist party's leaders were celebrating their third-place finish. Several protesters threw bottles as police kept them away from the building in Berlin.</s>The Central Council of Jews in Germany said a party “which tolerates extreme right-wing ideas and its ranks and stirs up hatred against minorities in our country” was now represented in parliament, while the Jewish World Congress declared AfD’s election results “abominable”. Anti-immigration party AfD won 12.6 per cent of the votes in Sunday’s election after a campaign which channelled public anger at Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door immigration policy from 2015. Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won most of the votes in the election but she lost many votes to the AfD.

AfD is now the third largest party in Bundestag and the first far-right group to enter the German parliament in 72 years. Dr Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said in a statement: “Unfortunately, our worst fears have come true: a party that tolerates far-right views in its ranks and incites hate against minorities in our country is today not only in almost all state parliaments but also represented in the Bundestag. “I expect all our democratic forces to unveil the real face of the AfD and to expose the party’s empty, populist promises. “The goal that should unite all democratic parties: to make it clear to the voters that the AfD is not an alternative, so that it can land where it belongs – under the five percent hurdle! ”

Ronald Lauder, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, described the AfD as a “shameful reactionary movement that was reminiscent of the worst of Germany’s past”. He slammed AfD’s election results as “abominable” and said the party now has the ability to “promote its vile platform” within the German parliament. The Turkish community in the country also expressed alarm over the AfD’s election results. Presidential candidate Gökay Sofuoglu said the party “unfortunately managed to get almost 13 percent of the votes despite or just because of their openly racist statements”.

Referring to an earlier statement by AfD leader Alexander Gauland, Mr Sofuoglu said: "It is now apparently possible to publicly think about 'getting rid of' humans or shooting them at our borders." Mr Gauland has previously called for Germany’s national integration commissioner, Aydan Özoguz, who is German-born and of Turkish heritage, to be “disposed of in Antolia”. The Turkish community urged all democrats to “finally work for an active organisation of the immigration society” and to make clear that a diverse and open society is not a burden but an opportunity. Mr Sofuoglu said: "Diversity is strong and successful. It is time to defend our democracy and the values of our basic law.”</s>About 700 demonstrators gathered in central Berlin on Sunday evening after the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party gained just over 13 per cent of the vote in the general election. The party’s gain was Chancellor Angela Merkel’s loss as although her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party won the most votes, she lost many to the AfD, whose leader has openly supported the Nazis. The election marks the first time in 72 years a far-right party will have entered the Bundestag. Crowds outside the building where the AfD was celebrating in Alexanderplatz were growing as protesters chanted “racism is not an alternative, “AfD is a bunch of racists” and “Nazis out!”.

Anti-AfD protests also took place in Cologne and Hamburg after the AfD experienced a late surge in support over the past two weeks. Many voters were turned off the CDU after Mrs Merkel’s open-door policy in 2015 which allowed thousands of migrants in, causing friction in many German cities. Former European Union (EU) leader Martin Schulz’s party, the Social Democrats (SDU) came second in the polls, but he refused to maintain the current coalition with the CDU, saying he would rather be in opposition to give voters a real alternative to the AfD. Mrs Merkel, who has been Chancellor for 12 years, may now have to form a coalition with two other parties, the Greens and FDP.

The AfD’s surge came following leader Alexander Gauland’s calls for Germans to feel proud of Nazi military achievements. The 76-year-old is also under police investigation after calling for Germany’s national integration commissioner, Aydan Özoguz, who is German-born and of Turkish heritage, to be “disposed of in Antolia”. German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel said this week: "We will have real Nazis in the Reichstag for the first time since the end of the Second World War.” However, Mr Gauland dismissed the warnings, telling his supporters: “Don't believe anything the other parties and politicians say about me. "Remember, when you are in the voting booth no one is looking over your shoulder, no one can see where you put your cross."

He added: “I don't believe Sigmar Gabriel is stupid enough to really believe we are Nazis.” The party’s hopes were not being taken seriously due to ongoing infighting and a vote to marginalise Frauke Petry, its official leader who was seen as its strongest asset. The campaign was handed over to Mr Gauland and Alice Weidel, from outside the party, which many thought would be the end of the AfD.</s>Berlin (CNN) They didn't win the biggest share of the vote, but the far-right Alternative for Germany party did manage to achieve what similar parties in the Netherlands and France failed to do -- fracture the country's political landscape.

Preliminary results suggest a huge surge in support for the AfD, putting it in third place after Germany's two biggest parties, Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union and the center-left Social Democratic Party .

The AfD, which was set up only four years ago, will become the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag since 1961.

Their vote more than doubled

Seen by many as a fledgling young party from the radical right, the AfD won just 4.7% of the vote in the last federal elections in 2013. This time around it took about 12.6%, according to preliminary official results.

They'll likely be on the political fringes

Following the exit polls, the SPD -- Merkel's coalition partner for the past four years -- immediately announced it would not join the next government and would instead go into opposition.

The party -- which saw its share of the vote decrease by more than 5% compared to 2013 -- said their poor showing indicated they had not received a mandate from the people to govern.

But the move also blocks the AfD from taking a more central opposition position in parliament, and instead looks to consign them to the political fringes of parliament.

They brought new voters to the polls

Nearly half of voters turned away from the country's two largest parties. The AfD also picked up nearly 700,000 ballots from people who were previously non-voters.

Julian Reichelt, editor-in-chief of Bild.de, told CNN the reason so many voters turned to the far right is because Merkel hasn't "been addressing many issues that people care about."

AfD voters "sent a dramatic message that many people are fed up with how politics is done," he said.

Merkel alluded to this on Sunday evening, saying that she would listen to those voters who had chosen the AfD instead.

"We will clearly analyze it, and we wish to get the voters back in order to deal with good policy and also to take away their anxieties," the Chancellor said.

They did better in the east than in the west

Merkel's failure to respond to voter concerns has seen the far right swoop in and scoop up votes from Germans preoccupied by issues of migration, security and national identity. The largest share of votes for the AfD came from eastern Germany, according to preliminary data from the political polling firm Infratest Dimap.

Some 21.5% of voters in the east voted for the far-right party, while 11% voted for the AfD in the west, according to Infratest Dimap.

Georg Pazderski, the leader of the AfD in Berlin, told CNN that the exit polls showed a "political earthquake" had taken place in the country.

"For the first time, we have a conservative party right beside our Christian Democrats and this is because they moved more and more to the left and we moved into the vacuum," Pazderski said.

Jasna Zajcek, an expert on rise of the far right in eastern Germany, said one of the reasons the AfD performed better than expected was that many voters in the east do not feel integrated into modern Germany.

She said these voters feel they still suffer from the loss of the more socialist state system that the former East Germany once provided.

Those voters don't understand why economic benefits are "thrown" at migrants while they suffer with high unemployment, small pensions and drug and alcohol problems, Zajcek added.</s>Berlin (CNN) The co-founder of the first far-right party to win seats in Germany's parliament in almost 60 years has warned that it is ready to "take back our country and our people."

Alexander Gauland, federal spokesman for the anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, Alternative for Germany (AfD), gave the warning after his party was projected to come in third place in Sunday's national election, according to a ZDF/ARD exit poll.

The result, which puts the AfD at about 13%, was described by leading party figures as a "political earthquake."

Gauland promised his party would provide staunch opposition to the new government, likely led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, adding: "We will hunt them. we will hunt Mrs. Merkel or whomever. And we will take back our country and our people."

Support for the AfD grew quickly following the arrival of more than a million refugees in Germany in 2015.

On Sunday, crowds gathered outside the party's headquarters in Berlin to protest the election result.

One protester, Julius, who declined to give his surname, said the success of the AfD made it a "sad day for Germany."

"The election results are shocking," said the 25-year-old from Berlin.

"I never thought the AfD would score as high as 13%. This is a sad day for Germany especially if we look back at our history.

"We will have to wait and see how many AfD parliamentarians will now be represented in the Bundestag but sadly it looks around 90 -- a shocking result for Germany. "

The AfD polled particularly strongly in East Germany, which includes Berlin, attracting 21.5% of the vote, according to exit polling conducted by by Infratest Dimap. In the West, it scored about 11%, the projections said. The results put the AfD on course to become the second largest party in the East, after the CDU.

Elgin and Friedhelm, a couple from Berlin, came to the protest after they watched the exit poll on television.

"We cannot believe that the AfD scored as high as 13% nationwide," they told CNN. "This is a catastrophe.

"To imagine that a right wing party is now moving into the German parliament is something we thought we would never see again in Germany after all that has happened in the past."

'Wrong answers' to the 'right questions'

First formed in 2013 at the height of Europe's debt crisis as an anti-European Union and anti-Euro party, the AfD has since turned its focus to immigration and Islam.

The party has also called for an upper limit on the number of refugees allowed to enter the country, "for the protection of Germany."

"As with many populist parties, the AfD often asks the right questions -- about immigration and integration, about the EU -- but tends to give the wrong answers," says Hartwig Pautz, political scientist at the University of the West of Scotland.

"Their answers are simplistic, unworkable and don't belong in a liberal democracy."

The AfD profited from a nationalist backlash after more than 1 million refugees entered the country in 2015, sparking debates about integration.

A series of terror attacks across Germany in 2016 drove support for the party to a peak of 16% in the polls and a spate of successes in local elections.

Like several other right-wing, populist parties across Europe, the AfD has taken controversial positions on key issues and been dogged by scandal and in-fighting.

The AfD was the only one to actively campaign against same-sex marriage before the parliamentary vote in June, calling on Germany to protect and preserve the "traditional" family.

According to Beate Küpper, a social psychologist at Hochschule Niederrhein University in North Rhine-Westphalia who studies the far right in Germany, the AfD targets a narrow group of voters: "the 15% who are against same-sex marriage and who hold strongly right-wing views."

But, as Pautz, the political scientist, argues, that minority is now represented in the German parliament. "And many of the new MPs will be inexperienced in politics and they will have a wide range of views."

The AfD in parliament will be "very inexperienced, very fractious, very fragmented." But it is difficult to know exactly how the party's presence will influence German politics and policy over the next four years. "We are in unknown waters," said Pautz.</s>The Alternative for Germany party has pledged to use its platform in parliament to "reclaim the country and its people." The AfD won nearly 14 percent of the vote in Sunday's election, giving them 94 seats.

Many believed the turmoil of the 20th century had immunized Germany from a return of far-right politics, but Sunday's result proved them wrong.

For the group's opponents who gathered to protest the result in Berlin, the Alternative for Germany's anti-migrant agenda has parallels with the Nazis' rise to power.

"It is the first time since after the war that a racist and neo-Nazi party is in parliament," said one protester. "So that is really worrying to us. And this reminds everyone of 1933."

Jewish groups were among those expressing fear over the results.

The AfD's co-leader, Alexander Gauland, has previously said Germans should be proud of their military's achievements in World War II. However, at a news conference Monday, he denied the party is racist.

Gauland said there is nothing in the party or in its program that could or should disturb Jewish people in Germany. He said his pledge to "reclaim the country" is meant symbolically, adding he does "not want to lose Germany to an invasion of foreign people from foreign cultures."

Analyst Professor Tanja Borzel of Berlin's Free University says Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to let close to a million migrants into Germany at the height of the migrant and refugee crisis in 2015 led many to punish her at the polls.

Merkel's Christian Democrats won the highest number of votes Sunday, but gained their lowest share in 70 years.

"Most people who voted for the Alternative for Germany did not vote for the party because they share the platform. It was a protest vote, clearly," Borzel said.

The far-right's success overshadowed Merkel's win, which gives her a fourth term in power.

She told supporters Monday that her aspiration is to win the AfD voters back through good politics and problem solving.

Her first problem is forming a government. The second-placed Social Democrats have ruled out working together, so Merkel's best option is likely a coalition with the Liberals and the Greens that could take months, Borzel says.

"It will be very hard to find a compromise on issues such as migration and refugees, but also climate change," Borzel said. "So, we are looking at probably some lengthy negotiations."

The AfD, meanwhile, has pledged to use its new platform in parliament to, in its words, "hunt down" Merkel and reclaim the country.</s>The European Jewish Congress (EJC) sent its warm congratulations to Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday for her party’s performance in the German Federal Elections, which will result in her heading a new government as Chancellor for a fourth term.

“We congratulate Chancellor Merkel on her re-election and the German people on their demonstration of democracy,” Dr. Moshe Kantor, President of the EJC, said. “Chancellor Merkel has shown tremendous courage and conviction in her support of the revival of Jewish life in Germany and has been a strong supporter of the State of Israel, both on a national basis and within the European Union.

“However, we are concerned by the strong showing of the far-right Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) which appears to have received more than 13% of the vote according to exit polls,” Kantor continued. AfD is the first far-right part to enter the Bundestag in more than half a century.

“We trust that centrist parties in the Bundestag will ensure that the AfD has no representation in the coming governing coalition. Some of the positions it has espoused during the election campaign display alarming levels of intolerance not seen in Germany for many decades and which are, of course, of great concerns to German and European Jews.”

While the EJC leader was expressing the deep concerns of European Jewry, however, Alexander Gauland, co-leader of the far-right AfD party said in a statement to media on Monday that Jews have “nothing to fear” from the election result.

“There is nothing in our party, in our program, that could disturb the Jewish people who live here in Germany,” Gauland said.

Nevertheless, the New York-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) also called the 13 percent win by the AfD a “disturbing milestone,” warning that “its leaders have made anti-Semitic statements and played down the evil of the Nazi regime.”

One AfD member who apparently agreed is the former party co-leader herself, Frauke Petry, who walked out of a news conference held with other party leaders shortly after it opened Monday in Berlin.

“After a long period of contemplation,” she told reporters, smiling, “I’ve decided I won’t be part of the AfD’s group in the German parliament but will initially be an independent member of parliament in the lower house.

“I think we should be open today that there is a disagreement over content in the AfD and I think we shouldn’t hush this up because society is calling for an open debate,” Petry went on. “I’ll do everything I can to achieve that, so the sensible ideas the AfD has been working on since 2013 actually become a political reality,” she added.

Petry told reporters before leaving that as an “anarchistic party”, AfD could be successful in opposition but would not be able to offer voters a credible option as a government. For this reason, she had decided not to take up her seat as part of the AfD group.

Her fellow party leaders, stunned by her announcement, were clearly shocked. Gauland told Reuters that neither he nor other party candidates knew why Petry left.</s>Alternative for Germany (AfD) was founded four years ago at the height of the eurozone crisis, when opposition to a German bailout of other countries using the common currency was strong.

The party narrowly failed to pass the 5% threshold to enter parliament in 2013 on a Eurosceptic platform, a hurdle it took handily this time following a campaign focused heavily on chancellor Angela Merkel's refugee policy.

The party received 12.6% of votes in Sunday's election to become the third-largest caucus in Parliament behind Ms Merkel's bloc and the Social Democrats.

Political analysts say AfD's success is all the more remarkable because it has drifted steadily rightward in a country where voters are sensitive to any revival of the extreme nationalism that brought Adolf Hitler to power 84 years ago.

Alternative for Germany's base is in the formerly communist east of the country. Anxiety over immigration is particularly strong in the east, despite the relatively low percentage of immigrants in the region, and leaders there have been among the most hard-line in their views.

AfD's leader in Thuringia state, Bernd Hoecke, called for a "U-turn" in the way Germany remembers its Nazi past. In neighbouring Saxony, a prominent member of the party, Jens Maier, declared that Germany's "culture of guilt" over the Second World War should be considered over.

AfD's first leader, Bernd Lucke, left the party two years ago after losing a leadership battle against Frauke Petry.

Frauke Petry, center, co-chairwoman of the AfD, leaves a press conference of the Alternative for Germany, AfD, in Berlin today. Pic: AP

Ms Petry has since become embroiled in a spat with other senior figures after urging her party to exclude members who express extremist views with the aim of attracting moderate voters.

She has been sidelined within the party in recent months by the more radical, nationalist wing of AfD.

How far right?

AfD's opponents have described the party as a far-right or even extreme-right movement, citing the xenophobic views expressed by some of its members.

Political scientists caution that while there are extremists in the party's ranks, its ideas are closer to those once held by the conservative wing of Ms Merkel's party than to the far-right fringe of German politics.

Still, some in AfD have expressed revisionist views of German history with anti-Semitic ideas without being kicked out of the party, and it is the farthest right party to win seats in parliament in about 60 years.

AfD top candidates Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel celebrate with their supporters during the election party of the nationalist 'Alternative for Germany', AfD, in Berlin, Germany yesterday. Pic: AP

Party co-leader Alexander Gauland prompted controversy again weeks before the election by saying that "we have the right to be proud of the achievements of Germans soldiers in two world wars".

All German parties receive public funding based on the number of the votes they receive in elections.

AfD has already collected millions of euros from entering 13 state assemblies and the European Parliament over the past four years.

The party can expect a further windfall from Sunday's federal election that will allow it to build a formidable operation in Berlin with hundreds of full-time staff.

Alternative for Germany has taken a very pro-Russia stance, calling for Western sanctions against Moscow over its involvement in the Ukraine conflict to be dropped.

Frauke Petry, co-chairwoman of the AfD, smiles after leaving a a press conference of the Alternative for Germany, AfD, in Berlin today. Pic: AP

Ms Petry travelled to Russia earlier this year for a secretive meeting with members of Russian president Vladimir Putin's party and AfD has courted Russian-speaking German voters with considerable success.

During the final weeks of the campaign, AfD was heavily promoted by Russian-language social media accounts.
Frauke Petry resigns as leader of the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD), a day after the party won seats in the Bundestag for the first time, saying the party has become too "anarchical" and "could not offer a credible platform".