Not everyone in the new AfD parliamentary group wanted to stay with a dual leadership – and not everyone liked the dual vote.
After a controversial debate, the new AfD parliamentary group decided that two chairmen should continue to head the group in the future.
A motion to move away from this principle, which, according to observers, was primarily directed against the previous co-chair Alice Weidel, did not receive a majority on Thursday, according to information from parliamentary groups.
Only 82 of the 83 AfD MPs were invited to the meeting on Thursday. After some MPs objected to his inclusion in the parliamentary group on Wednesday, Matthias Helferich, who had come to the Bundestag via the AfD’s NRW state list, waived. It still has to be decided whether he wants to and may at least take part in the meetings as a guest in the future.
Helferich was suspended from office during the election campaign. The background to the regulatory measure decided by the federal executive committee were statements in older chats. The AfD politician does not deny that he described himself as the “friendly face of the NS”. However, this term was merely a third-party attribution by left-wing bloggers whom he “satirized”, he explained. According to information from parliamentary groups, criticism of Helferich came from MPs Uwe Witt and Gottfried Curio, among others.
The electoral regulations were also initially controversial. Some members of the new parliamentary group did not want the two top candidates – Weidel and party leader Tino Chrupalla – to stand for election together as group leaders. The co-party chairman Jörg Meuthen had also spoken out against such a double vote. Support for this solution came from the outgoing chairman Alexander Gauland. He emphasized that he had worked very well with Weidel as a co-group leader. Ultimately, the parliamentary group decided to vote in tandem. The result of this vote, however, was extremely close.
The AfD received 10.3 percent of the second vote in the Bundestag election on Sunday. On the reasons for the loss of votes – four years earlier, the right-wing populists had become the largest opposition faction with 12.6 percent of the vote – there are different views in the party leadership.
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