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AFP
Cologne
Germany's anti-immigration AfD wrapped up a fractious party congress Sunday by choosing a new team to lead it into a September general election, after dramatically sidelining its most prominent personality.
Capping two days of often bitter debate on its platform and personnel, the Alternative for Germany appointed two chief candidates: 76-year-old Alexander Gauland, a hardline defector from Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU, and Alice Weidel, 38, an openly lesbian former investment banker.
The party's telegenic co-leader Frauke Petry had already announced last week she would not join the campaign squad, following weeks of bitter infighting between populists and more radical, hard-right forces.
Weidel told cheering delegates that the AfD was the only party that could protect Germany's borders and ensure public security.
Referring to an attack on a Berlin Christmas market that claimed 12 lives committed by a failed asylum seeker, she called it a"scandal" that"in our country, Christian holidays have to be protected by police with machine guns and barriers for trucks".
"As a woman I should be able to take the last train home in safety," she added.
Earlier the party, now represented in 11 of Germany's 16 states, signed off on a programme that it hopes will pave the way for it to enter the national parliament for the first time in its four-year history.
It included calls to stop family unification of refugees already in Germany, strip immigrants convicted of"significant crimes" of their German passports, and declare Islam incompatible with German culture.
