The Wing, a group inside the Alternative for Germany party, promised to close down after a warning from the country’s intelligence service, but the change may be mostly cosmetic. BERLIN — The leaders of a far-right faction inside Germany’s right-wing populist opposition have asked the group’s members to “cease their activities,” an apparent surrender that analysts cautioned was more likely to be a tactical move in the troubled party’s internal power struggles. The party, Alternative for Germany, currently has the largest opposition grouping in Germany’s federal Parliament, but the country’s domestic intelligence service announced this month that it was monitoring an activist group within the organization — Der Flügel, or “The Wing” — as potential far-right extremists. National leaders of the party then voted to demand that The Wing dissolve.
But its members have not been asked to leave the party, and its leaders, Björn Höcke and Andreas Kalbitz, remain in senior positions in two of the party’s state chapters. “In principle, it is not possible to dissolve what does not formally exist,” Mr. Höcke and Mr. Kalbitz wrote in a Facebook post announcing the dissolution on Monday evening.
Alternative for Germany — widely known by its German initials, AfD — has long been defined by rivalry between more extreme voices, often in the East, and more moderate populists, often in the West, with The Wing seen as being ascendant. That has changed in recent weeks. As the AfD has struggled at the polls in the face of the coronavirus and disgust at recent racist attacks, The Wing in particular has been involved in a series of scandals and overreaches. A short-lived political coup in Thuringia, Mr.
Höcke’s state, was followed by the intelligence agency’s unusual public warning, and then reports that Mr. Kalbitz had secretly been a member of a neo-Nazi group. On Friday, 11 of the 13 members of the national party board voted to have the group dissolve itself.
““It’s nothing but a tactical maneuver,” said Hajo Funke, a professor at the Free University of Berlin who studies right-wing extremism.”
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“They have not lost one iota of their influence within the party. ” The Wing itself has an estimated 7,000 followers and constitutes about a fifth of the party’s total membership, but it has long commanded outsize attention, not least because of its members’ extreme views. Its Facebook page has more than 16,000 followers. “They’ve built themselves a parallel structure, and the federal board wants it to draw down that activity to zero,” Bastian Behrens, a spokesman for the national Alternative for Germany party, said on Friday.
Mr. Höcke, perhaps The Wing’s most visible leader, is a history teacher turned far-right ideologue with links to neo-Nazi circles. He is the author of a book demanding far-reaching changes to Germany’s postwar liberal democratic order, to be achieved through what he terms “temperate brutality. ” “A few small corrections and little reforms won’t do, but German absolutism will be the guarantee that we will tackle this thoroughly and fundamentally,” he writes in one passage.
Mr. Kalbitz, the head of the party in the state of Brandenburg and another senior figure in The Wing, has previously acknowledged having belonged to groups close to neo-Nazis. Recently, however, his name was found on a membership list of the neo-Nazi group Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend as late as 2007, according to the German news media, a link that under the party’s rule book should have barred him from joining Alternative for Germany. Mr.
Behrens, the spokesman for the party, acknowledged the charges and said Mr. Kalbitz would have to take steps to clear his name, implying that the party had not made a decision about Mr. Kalbitz’s fate. “We can’t make any sanctions just because there were two press reports,” he said.
Mr. Kalbitz has denounced the reports as false. Professor Funke said that while The Wing was under pressure now, its apparent dissolution was likely to be followed by propagation of its platform in the wider party. “The power struggle is far from over, and at this point they are merely shadowboxing,” he said.
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