Founding member Konrad Adam leaves the AfD - after criticism of the party's way

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The AfD is in a crisis: The last founding member of the party is leaving its own ranks. The reasons lie primarily in the behavior of members.

With the publicist Konrad Adam , the last of the three AfD founding chairmen is now leaving the party. Adam told the German Press Agency in Berlin, On January 1, 2021 I will no longer be a member of the AfD. The 78-year-old no longer sees a future for the AfD as a "bourgeois-conservative" force, he justified his decision.

Gauland is said to have stood protectively in front of Höcke

The chairman of the AfD parliamentary group, Alexander Gauland , accused Adam of always protecting himself against south-wing extremists like Andreas Kalbitz and the Thuringian state chairman Björn Höcke. In doing so, he contributed to the fact that the influence of the far right wing in the party had grown steadily. In addition, the AfD is on the wrong track with its negative attitude towards environmental and climate protection, criticized Adam, who belongs to the Hessian regional association.

The conservative journalist is one of the founding members of the AfD. In 2013 he took over the party chairmanship together with Frauke Petry and Bernd Lucke . Lucke left the AfD in July 2015 after being voted out of office at a party congress in Essen, which was marked by tumult. He was followed by numerous members who were assigned to the economically liberal wing. Adam failed at that time with his candidacy for the post of assessor. Most recently he was only active in the AfD-affiliated Desiderius Erasmus Foundation, which is headed by former CDU member Erika Steinbach , and of which he is still honorary chairman. Petry left the AfD in autumn 2017. Since then, she has been a non-attached member of the Bundestag.

Lobbyism makes "credible politics impossible"

Adam criticized what he saw as the excessive influence of lobbyists on the parliamentary work of the AfD. There is lobbyism in other parties too, but lobbyists dominate the AfD in a way that makes credible politics impossible. This applies, for example, to transport policy and agricultural policy.

Adam also finds it worthy of criticism that the AfD in its seventh year of existence still has no sociopolitical concept to show.

In the AfD, the inability to compromise is a birth defect, said the former party chairman. He decided in late 2012 to found a party together with like-minded people because Germany lacked a real opposition party at the time, he says in retrospect. That was also clearly shown during the refugee crisis of 2015. In the meantime, however, the Höcke wing in the AfD has grown stronger. This is particularly noticeable in the Eastern regional associations. A split in the AfD into an East and a West party can no longer be ruled out.

Adam said, he was occasionally accused by AfD members that his criticism was only an expression of his frustration that he was no longer elected to party offices. But this is wrong. After my candidacy at the 2015 party congress in Essen was unsuccessful, I was silent for three years before I made my criticism public. Especially the AfD, as a party that runs with the slogan"We are the Basic Law, should not simply ignore financial irregularities and breaches of the statutes. This is exactly what happened several times in the past few years.