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With 78-year-old publicist Konrad Adam, the last of AfD’s three founding presidents leaves the party. “On January 1, 2021 I will no longer be a member of the AfD,” Adam told the German press agency. He no longer sees a future for the AfD as a “bourgeois-conservative” force, he justified his decision.
The president of the AfD parliamentary group, Alexander Gauland, accused Adam of always protecting himself against “extremists from the south like Andreas Kalbitz and the president of the state of Thuringia, Björn Höcke.” In doing so, he contributed to the fact that the influence of the far right in the party had steadily grown. Furthermore, the AfD is going the wrong way with its negative stance on the protection of the environment and the climate, criticized Adam, who belongs to the state association of Hesse.
The conservative journalist is one of the founding members of the AfD. In 2013 he assumed the presidency of the party together with Frauke Petry and Bernd Lucke. When it was founded, the AfD was primarily critical of the euro and criticized the financial policy of the European Union. Soon, prominent members of the party became increasingly focused on issues related to immigration policy.
To this day, infighting for power often shapes the party’s image. Petry left the AfD in autumn 2017. Since then, he has been a non-Bundestag member.
“There are certainly far-right tendencies in the AfD”
Lucke left the AfD in July 2015 after being ousted from office at a tumultuous party convention in Essen. It was followed by numerous members who were assigned to the economically liberal wing.
Adam failed at the time with his candidacy for the adviser position and then made massive accusations. There were “direct instructions from above” for delegates on who should be voted on, Adam said in a world-Interview 2019. Entire state associations would have paid their members not only travel expenses, but also accommodation expenses. “Something like that used to be called vote buying.”
Adam accused the leader of the Bundestag parliamentary group, Gauland, of securing his power by crude methods and of knowingly trusting dubious partners. “There are undoubtedly right-wing extremist tendencies in the AfD,” Adam said in 2019.
More recently, Adam was only actively involved in the AfD-affiliated Desiderius Erasmus Foundation, which is headed by former CDU member Erika Steinbach, and whose honorary chair, Adam, remains.
