AfD heads for weekend showdown

Germany's right-wing populist AfD party will attempt to paper over festering rivalries at a weekend party congress to ensure it enters parliament for the first time in September's general election.

After weeks of bitter infighting, co-leader Frauke Petry made the shock announcement this week that she would not seek to lead the AfD's campaign at the gathering starting Saturday in the western city of Cologne. The news left the upstart anti-immigration party reeling and set the stage for a showdown between populist and more radical, hard-right forces.

(Petry) has been unable to stop the AfD, which began as a party of euro critics, from becoming more and more a catch-all for racists, right-wing nationalists and the far right, Cologne's daily Stadt-Anzeiger said. The fight within the AfD rages on. Founded in 2013 on a eurosceptic platform, the AfD has railed against Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to let in more than one million asylum seekers to Germany since 2015.

But its fortunes have declined as the number of new arrivals has dwindled, and all of Germany's mainstream parties have ruled out working with it should it clear the five-percent hurdle to representation in the September 24 election.  Opinion polls show the AfD at between seven and 11 percent, a steep drop from the 15 percent support it drew only late last year. Merkel is seeking a fourth term after nearly 12 years in power and her conservative Christian Democrats are currently leading the polls.

But the AfD claims credit for helping to push her to toughen Germany's border policy in the wake of the refugee influx. And AfD seats in the Bundestag lower house -- a first in Germany -- would complicate the process of forming a ruling coalition for Merkel or her main challenger, Martin Schulz.

Authorities are bracing for a massive counter protest of around 50,000 people and have set up a broad security zone around the congress venue, a hotel in the city center. We have information that several thousand left-wing extremists will be coming to Cologne... including several hundred violent people, police chief Juergen Mathias said.

The telegenic Petry, a 41-year-old trained chemist who is pregnant with her fifth child, has aligned herself with kindred spirits across Europe, including far-right firebrand Marine Le Pen, one of the frontrunners for the first round of French elections Sunday.

-AFP, Cologne