Germany's AfD party elects Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel as general election candidates

Germany's right-wing, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has elected two new top candidates for the September general election after the party’s best-known politician, Frauke Petry, said last week she would no longer be available.

AfD co-founder Alexander Gauland, 76, and 38-year-old economist Alice Weidel will jointly head the campaign after being elected at their weekend party convention in Cologne. 

Divisions erupted among the different factions of the German nationalists as delegates from the AfD rejected an appeal on Saturday by Petry to seek a more pragmatic political path instead of turning into a “fundamental opposition” party. The defeat was a significant blow for AfD co-leader Petry, whose position in the party is now substantially weakened. 

Petry had wanted the AfD to seek coalition with other parties and reject extremist views but delegates voted against discussing Petry’s motion or another proposal in which she and others said the AfD should reject “racist, antisemitic ... and nationalist ideologies”.

Instead, they stressed the need to show unity after months of bitter infighting that have helped drag down its poll ratings to less than 10%. Against her advice, they also voted to field a team of national candidates.

Saturday also saw violent skirmishes between police and some of the 15,000 protesters who had gathered outside the congress.

Founded in 2013, the AfD rose on a wave of opposition to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's 2015 open-door policy to refugees.

The party is seeking to enter the national parliament for the first time in September's vote, but opinion polls suggest a sharp drop in the AfD's popularity.

Gauland, 76, is one of the party’s most prominent members and one of Petry’s main rivals.

“We want to keep our home country, keep our identity, and we are proud to be German,” he said in his acceptance speech. 

Weidel, 38, is a consultant from south-western Germany who has not stood in the spotlight of the four-year-old party so far. 

“If we now stick together and fight together, then finally a true opposition party will be getting into German Parliament,” she told cheering delegates. 

The party members also voted for an election manifesto that is harsh on immigration and Muslims and reiterates calls for leaving the European Union’s euro currency. 

The head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany condemned the AfD’s further move to the far right, saying the party is trying to make “a chauvinist-nationalist way of thinking socially acceptable in Germany again”. 

Gauland is seen as a supporter of senior AfD figure Bjoern Hoecke, who caused outrage this year by calling the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a "memorial of shame".

Gauland himself provoked controversy by saying last year that Germans would not want a black German footballer as a neighbour. He later said the comments reflected his own views.