The nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) may have a new face to lead it through the 2017 federal election campaign, according to media reports on Thursday. In an interview with Berlin daily "Tagesspiegel," party chief Frauke Petry hinted that she may step down from politics amidst rumors of growing discontent with her leadership.

Read: Ten things you need to know about the AfD

"Neither politics nor the AfD are the only alternatives," said Petry, in a preview of a fuller profile to be published Friday. Her reasons were not, it seemed, frustration with slipping poll numbers as Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) reclaimed some of its traditional territory to the right of the center.

No, Petry said, she was simply reaching her personal and professional limits: "After more than four years in the AfD, I've expended a huge amount of energy and made a departure from my regular life."

Before helping party founder Bernd Lücke (whom the party ousted in her favor nearly two years ago) get the party off the ground in 2013, Petry was a chemist and businesswoman. After moving into politics, Petry separated from her husband and father of her four children, and has steered the party on a course of increasingly controversial national-conservatism.

Her strategy of emphasizing anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies was at first a boon to the AfD. Even in the aftermath of scandals including statements from prominent members downplaying the Holocaust, support continued to grow, and the party easily crossed the five-percent election threshold required to enter a number of new state parliaments.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alexander Gauland Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team's defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch - but people would not want "someone like Boateng as a neighbor." He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: "We can't be blackmailed by children's eyes."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alice Weidel Alice Weidel generally plays the role of "voice of reason" for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians "pigs" and "puppets of the victorious powers in World War II. Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Frauke Petry German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must "use firearms if necessary" to "prevent illegal border crossings." Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Björn Höcke The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year - leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Beatrix von Storch Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts - but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Marcus Pretzell Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote "These are Merkel's dead," shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andre Wendt The member of parliament in Germany's eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andre Poggenburg Poggenburg, head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alexander Gauland - again ... During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be "disposed of" back to Anatolia. The German term, "entsorgen," raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks ... and again Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany's responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andreas Kalbitz The Brandenburg state AfD chief admitted in 2019 to attending a 2007 rally in Greece by the ultranationalist Golden Dawn party at which a swastika flag was raised. "Der Spiegel" had published a leaked report by the German embassy in Athens naming him as one of "14 neo-Nazis" who arrived from Germany for the far-right rally. Kalbitz released a statement saying he took part out of "curiosity." Author: Dagmar Breitenbach



CDU reclaims the right

The CDU had been moving increasingly to the center over the past four years, which is partly the result of a grand coalition with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), and Merkel's refugee policy. However, as September's election approaches, the chancellor and her party have distanced themselves from the SPD, for example by backing down from the idea of introducing dual citizenship, to surprisingly swift results. In the first test of the CDU's new direction, at regional elections in the state of Saarland last Sunday, the CDU jumped five percent in poll numbers from the last election and captured the most seats in the legislature.

The AfD, on the other hand, garnered only about six percent of the vote, enough to enter Saarland's parliament but humiliating in comparison to the much larger numbers it scored in regional elections last year.

AfD official: Petry trying to blackmail party members

Petry insisted, however, that the anger directed at her over this defeat would not be the reason for her possible resignation. Politics should never be taken personally, or "you won't last long," she told Tagesspiegel.

Speaking to the daily later on Thursday, Petry's deputy Alexander Gauland criticized her comments as "not well thought through," and said he "didn't take it too seriously." She belongs in the party, Gauland added. One anonymous high-ranking party official was more harsh, calling it "blackmail," a clear attempt to gather support and sympathy ahead of a key party meeting.

The AfD is set to choose its candidate for chancellor at its party convention in the western city of Cologne at the end of April.