Rift on the right

FOUNDED in 2013, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has wreaked havoc in German politics with its mix of Eurosceptic views and highbrow credentials. One of its early nicknames was the “professors’ party”, because several founders, including Bernd Lucke, one of its three spokesmen, used to teach economics. With this academic prowess, the AfD became the first respectable party to break a post-war taboo on questioning the country’s destiny at the heart of European institutions.

But in common with maverick parties on the less respectable right—the UK Independence Party has just had a leadership row, and France’s National Front (FN) has expelled its founder—the German party is suffering badly from internal fissures.

Last year the party did well in elections to the European Parliament and in the three eastern states of Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia. This streak of success continued in Hamburg in February and in Bremen this month. Everything suggested the AfD would enter the Bundestag in 2017, pulling German politics to the right. But internal squabbles have made that less sure.

That is because the AfD’s early successes coincided with some unsavoury developments. Candidates around Mr Lucke, such as Hans-Olaf Henkel, an economically liberal and socially tolerant industrialist, kept preaching a message of anti-euro conservatism. But others, including...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1FzKPDn