Germany's Divided Anti-migrant AfD Alarmed By Poll Dip

BERLIN, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 28th Feb, 2017 ) - With seven months until German elections, support for the right-wing populist AfD party has slipped from highs seen during the mass migrant influx to single digits in the polls, alarming its divided leadership.

The Alternative for Germany party has struggled to reunite after a damaging split deepened by a hard-right member's comments on Germany's Holocaust guilt. The protest party has also bled support as a strong mainstream candidate, the Social Democrat Martin Schulz, has emerged with a bold pledge to defeat their declared enemy, Chancellor Angela Merkel, in September elections.

This week, the AfD leadership sent out a letter to their almost 27,000 rank-and-file members, urging unity after a surge of infighting sparked by right-wing member Bjoern Hoecke. Hoecke sparked national outrage in January when he labelled Berlin's Holocaust monument a "memorial of shame" and called for "a 180-degree shift" in the country's culture of remembrance.

The widely-deplored comments moved the AfD close to neo-Nazi rhetoric just as its public face, Frauke Petry, has sought to portray it as an acceptable conservative-nationalist movement, copying her French ally the far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

With the four-year-old party embroiled in civil war between its right and far-right wings, and Petry seeking to expel Hoecke, the AfD urged members to "close ranks against the establishment parties".

The appeal came as the party, after a string of state election successes, dipped from 15-percent poll support in December back to as low as eight percent in a recent survey. For a long time, "a double-digit result in the national elections seemed a given," wrote news site Spiegel Online. For the moment, it judged, "the euphoria is finished."