FOR a political movement like the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the shaking of Europe’s foundations should have been a great opportunity. The party was founded in 2013 as Germany’s first euro-sceptic (rather than Eurosceptic) party. Back then, this meant opposition to the common currency but not the European Union (EU). The message changed in 2014, as the euro crisis temporarily disappeared from the front pages of newspapers and the party began attracting people with different interests. These (mainly eastern) new fans dislike immigrants, Muslims, homosexuals, “political correctness” in the media, a perceived anti-Russian bias in foreign policy, and the EU and NATO generally. Bernd Lucke, an economic liberal who was the party’s public face, at first went along with this drift to the nationalist right, in the hope of electoral gains. The AfD duly entered the European Parliament and several regional assemblies.

To Mr Lucke’s chagrin, however, the party’s growing right wing also spawned some rivals. The most charismatic of them is Frauke Petry, a mother of four, a (failed) businesswoman and party boss in Saxony. Light skirmishing turned into open fighting within the party, with the far right backing Ms Petry and moderates lining up behind Mr Lucke. At a party congress on July 4th Ms Petry trounced Mr Lucke, winning 60% of the delegate vote to his 38%. Barely suppressing tears, Mr Lucke slammed his laptop shut and left the stage. On July 8th he quit the party altogether.

So did hundreds of his supporters, including four of the party’s seven members of the European Parliament. One of them, Hans-Olaf Henkel, warned that the AfD was now an “NPD in sheep’s clothing”, a reference to a German neo-Nazi party. Ms Petry denied any such tilt. But in effect the AfD is now the German equivalent of France’s Front National.

As the week progressed, more memberships were cancelled, and the faction around Mr Lucke was debating whether to found a new political group. If that happens, neither party would reach the thresholds needed to enter national or regional legislatures. Germany’s Eurosceptics are thus destroying themselves at the moment when they hoped to pick up votes by dominating every news cycle with calls for a Grexit.

And yet their implosion will not slow Germany’s shift to a more hawkish stance in the euro crisis. In recent weeks, another factor had pushed the AfD toward the extreme right, says Timo Lochocki at the German Marshall Fund, a think-tank. It was the rightward move by the mainstream parties in the governing coalition of the chancellor, Angela Merkel. Fed up with Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister (whom German headlines liken to a man driving the wrong way on a motorway), Mrs Merkel’s own Christian Democrats and even many centre-left Social Democrats are now “indirectly campaigning for Grexit”, thinks Mr Lochocki. “Tsipras, not the AfD, moved German politics right.”