BERLIN: Leaders of Germany’s far-right AfD party were at loggerheads on Thursday over whether its radical “Fluegel” (The Wing) faction should be split off to create a separate party.

Two parties could probably reach more voters than the “current ... conflict-prone constellation”, party co-leader Joerg Meuthen told the Tichys Einblick news magazine in an interview published on Wednesday.

“Everyone knows that Fluegel and its key exponents are costing us a massive amount of votes in the conservative camp,” he said.

But AfD grandee Alexander Gauland said on Thursday that two parties would diminish, rather than strengthen, one another. “Joerg Meuthen’s thoughts are not very constructive and highly apolitical,” he said, according to German news agency DPA.

Fluegel, which has about 7,000 members, was co-founded by notorious AfD lawmaker Bjoern Hoecke, who has sparked outrage with attacks on Germany’s culture of remembrance for Nazi crimes. Hoecke also criticised Meuthen’s comments in a Facebook post, describing them as “foolish and irresponsible”.

“The discussion about the division of our party into a western and an eastern AfD, into a Fluegel and a non-Fluegel AfD is superfluous,” Hoecke wrote.

The AfD in March said it was planning to dissolve the radical Fluegel group after it was placed under formal surveillance by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.

Intelligence officials said Fluegel violated “characteristic features of the free democratic basic order, human dignity, democracy and the rule of law”.

Published in Dawn, April 3rd, 2020