Election premiere 2026 planned: Former AfD boss Petry wants to start a new party

Former AfD chairman Frauke Petry wants to found a new party that is scheduled to compete in state elections from 2026. “Preparatory for this, Stmstreiter and I founded the” Team Freiheit “team a few months ago,” said the former co-founder of the AfD in the world interview. She does not want to reveal the name of the party yet, but the content of the content is already certain.

“The gap in the party system is not stuck between the CDU and AfD, but in the empty space of an anti-etatist, liberal offer,” said the 49-year-old. The program of the new party will “be a renewal of the cultural western bond and an anti-actual offer as a positive counter-draft to the previous party landscape”. The state quota – i.e. the ratio of government spending on gross domestic product – must be reduced from almost 50 to 25 percent within five years, said Petry. There is no party that wanted to enforce this goal “and freedom of expression”.

The chemist once founded the AfD together with Bernd Lucke and other colleagues, but left after internal party friction shortly after the 2017 Bundestag election. At the time, she justified her departure with a growing influence of the right-wing flow around the Thuringian AfD state chief Björn Höcke. The Bundestag subsequently belonged to Petry as a member of the parliamentary MP, whereby the blue party was still founding the blue party – however, the election flaps in Saxony and Thuringia again announced their dissolution at the end of 2019.

Now she hopes for a more successful fresh start. “We will compete for the state elections next year, first in Baden-Württemberg,” announced Petry. “With the peculiarity that we want to win non-party citizens and entrepreneurs with life and professional experience as candidates. They should not become members of the party for this.” This would represent 98 percent of the citizens who themselves do not belong to any party.