Alternative for Germany has said it is the target of a smear campaign after the publication of an email allegedly sent by its leading candidate that called the government pigs and said German guilt over the second world war was to blame for immigration.



Alice Weidel, who has been presented as the rightwing populist party’s moderate voice following a series of scandals, distanced herself from the email. Christian Lüth, a spokesman for the AfD, said it was fake and Weidel had reassured him that she had not written it.

Political opponents said Weidel would have to stand down as the AfD’s leading candidate if the email was authentic.

Written in 2013, before the party was established, the email said Germany has been “overrun by Arabs, Sinti and Roma”. The government is described as “puppets” of second world war enemies tasked with limiting the growth of the German people.

It was published by the newspaper Welt am Sonntag in the face of threats from Weidel’s lawyers that it was unlawful to “publicly claim that our client wrote this text or to even voice that suspicion”.

The newspaper stood by its decision and said it had received the email from a former colleague of Weidel’s when she worked as an asset manager in Frankfurt. The source swore via an affidavit that it was authentic, Welt am Sonntag said, adding that it had other reasons to support its authenticity.

The email said: “The reason why we are overrun by culturally alien peoples such as Arabs, Sinti and Roma is the systematic destruction of civil society as a possible counterweight from the enemies of the constitution who govern us.

“These pigs are nothing other than marionettes of the victorious powers of the second world war, whose task it is to keep down the German people.”

It goes on to say the “disappropriation” of Germany during the attempts to rescue the euro was yet another indication of the country’s lack of sovereignty as the price for its defeat in 1945.

Weidel was politically active in Wahlalternative (Electoral Alternative) 2013, a predecessor to the AfD, when the email was purportedly written.

The AfD, formed later in 2013, has representatives in 13 of the 16 state parliaments and is polling at 11% ahead of the federal election on 24 September, when it is set to enter the Bundestag as Germany’s third-largest political party.

Christian Scheuer, the general secretary of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian-based partner to Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said the email showed that “behind Frau Weidel’s pseudo-bourgeois facade is concealed the terrifying ideology of a reichsbürgerin (citizen of the reich)”, referring to a movement of extreme and often violent individuals who reject the legitimacy of the modern German state.

He said the AfD “is in truth a party of liars which rejects and fights against German constitutional order”.

Manuela Schwesig, the Social Democratic party leader of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, said: “The AfD is in parts an extremist party with radical characteristics. It is dangerous for Germany, stoking a climate of hate and fear. If these allegations are confirmed, Frau Weidel’s position will be untenable.”

Wolfgang Kubicki of the pro-business Free Democratic party said he expected the truth to come to light before the election. “If the mail turns out to have been from her, then her false declaration would mean she is no longer able to be the main candidate,” he said.

Weidel’s fellow leading candidate, Alexander Gauland, called the reports a “scurrilous attempt to claw at Alice Weidel’s beautiful face”.

“This email is not written in her language,” he told the newspaper Bild. “It doesn’t match her at all. It is a nasty attempt to keep the AfD out of the Bundestag at any price. A pathetic campaign in which the media is also a participant.”

In a video interview, Weidel told the newspaper Die Welt she had said all she intended to say on the matter.

“I find it simply incredible. I’ve said all I want to say on this topic via my spokesman,” she said. “Two weeks before the election, I am really not going to jump over every absurd little stick that is held out in front of me and in so doing to fuel this crude campaign.”