Hundreds of protesters gathered in the northeastern German city of Jüterborg on Saturday as the Berlin branch of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) chose its leader for next year’s parliamentary elections.
The anti-immigration party chose Beatrix von Storch as party leader in the German capital for the elections for the Bundestag, the country’s lower house, in September.
Von Storch, the party’s deputy parliamentary leader in the Bundestag, previously led the AfD’s campaign in Berlin in the 2017 and 2021 elections and won support from 87% of conference attendees to run again.
The AfD, founded in 2013 as a Eurosceptic party that has since shifted its focus to immigration, currently appears well placed to achieve its best result yet in national polls, having secured around 30% of the vote in recent elections for three state parliaments.
However, the country faces an uphill battle to increase its 9.4% share of the vote in Berlin in the last national elections.
The party’s Berlin branch was forced to move its membership conference to Jüterborg, some 50 kilometers south of Berlin in Brandenburg state, after failing to find a venue in the capital.
Protesters gathered at Jüterborg station in the morning and marched to the conference venue, the Wiesenhalle, carrying banners reading ‘No room for the AfD. No room for right-wing agitation’ and ‘Together against fascism’.
The organizers of the rally, an alliance of citizens’ initiatives, trade unions and far-left groups, estimate the number of participants at between 500 and 600.
The AfD is currently under surveillance by the federal domestic intelligence service for suspected extreme political activities, and certain state-level AfD associations have been classified as extremist.