Far-right party’s convention draws protests as Germany’s election campaign warms up
RIESA, Germany (AP) — Thousands of people demonstrated against a convention of the far-right Alternative for Germany on Saturday, blocking some roads and delaying the meeting’s start as parties launched their campaigns for the country’s election next month.
A heavy police presence was in place in Riesa — in the eastern state of Saxony, a stronghold of Alternative for Germany, or AfD — and officers cleared some protesters from the streets. However, the two-day convention started a little over two hours late as many delegates’ trips to the venue were slowed by blockades.
AfD formally nominated co-leader Alice Weidel as its candidate for chancellor by acclamation. Weidel, who was among those held up, thanked delegates for “defying the left-wing mob and getting here.”
Polls show AfD in second place ahead of the Feb. 23 election, with about 20% support. However, Weidel — who this week held a live chat with tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has endorsed the party, on his X platform — has no realistic chance of becoming Germany’s leader as other parties refuse to work with AfD.
It is the mainstream conservative opposition Union bloc that leads polls with around 30% and its candidate, Friedrich Merz, is the favorite to become the next chancellor.
The Union is focusing on boosting Germany’s stagnant economy in particular and on reducing irregular migration. Weidel assailed it as a “party of fraudsters” Saturday, urging people to “vote for the original” and strengthen her party.
She called for closing Germany’s borders to undocumented migration and large-scale deportations of asylum-seekers, making clear that she has no problem with the politically charged term “remigration.”
She pledged to return to service the Nord Stream gas pipeline that was damaged in 2022 explosions shortly after Russia cut off gas supplies to Germany, and won loud applause for saying that AfD would tear down all wind turbines — which she described as “windmills of shame” — if it came to power.
At a news conference in Hamburg, Merz concentrated on his own party’s offer of “fundamental change” after the unpopular and notoriously rancorous coalition of center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz collapsed.
He said he aims to lead “a government that stops arguing; a government that draws up reliable laws that also endure in the longer term,” producing a reliable environment for domestic and foreign investors. “Then we will have higher potential growth, and then we will have higher actual growth again.”
Scholz is hoping for a come-from-behind victory, but there has been little sign of significant movement so far in polls that show support for his Social Democrats at 14-17%. His coalition government collapsed in November when he fired his finance minister in a dispute over how to revitalize the economy, leading to an early election.
Scholz conceded Saturday that mistakes were made and said that “maybe I should also have ended the coalition earlier.” But he said that it’s time to look to the future. “Let’s fight,” he told delegates at a party convention in Berlin, which formally confirmed his nomination as its candidate in a show of hands.
He accused Merz’s Union of having no serious plans to tackle Germany’s problems and said it is making “expensive promises for the absolute top earners” that would “rip a gigantic crater in our budget.”
Scholz, who has made Germany one of the leading weapons suppliers to Ukraine in its war with Russia but refused to send it Taurus long-range cruise missiles, again pledged to maintain his “steadfast and prudent” approach.
And he reiterated his pushback against U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s recently expressed designs on Greenland and other territories, declaring without naming Trump that “the principle of the inviolability of borders applies to every country, whether it lies to the east of us or the west; every state must keep to this principle, whether it is a small state or a very big and powerful one.”
Merz said that “public finger-pointing from Germany has never made an impression in America, and as a rule has achieved the opposite.”
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Moulson reported from Berlin. Pietro De Cristofaro contributed to this report from Riesa.
By FANNY BRODERSEN and GEIR MOULSON
Associated Press
