A defection from the #AfD brings the number of parties in Germany’s parliament to 8. It could not matter less

When Lucke and his supporters left the AfD in 2015, they founded a new party called ALFA. Because another group with a similar name already existed, they had to change it to LKR, which stands for liberal-conservative reformers.

This label neatly encapsulates Lucke’s vision for the AfD. It’s a brand that helped him to establish his former party in an environment that would have been hostile to a more obviously radical right party. It is also a product for which there is little demand at the moment.

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In the 2019 EP election, a free-for-all for political misfits with no legal electoral threshold, the party polled a cool 0.1 per cent. They have no state-level MPs, no relevant membership base, and, in my professional opinion, no future. And Lucke himself has retired from politics.

But thanks to yet another defection from the AfD’s parliamentary party in the Bundestag (the sixth, I think), the LKR now have a single MP for the remainder of this parliament (about 12 months). This brings the number of parties in parliament back to eight. It’s back to eight, because a much more prominent former AfD MP, former leader Frauke Petry, had also set up a party of their own after the 2017 election. But Petry’s Blue Party is no more.

Nothing of this matters. Petry never managed to poach enough MPs from the AfD to form a parliamentary party (I think she gained a single follower). The new LKR MP will not even bother trying. I wonder whether he, or in fact anyone in the LKR, thinks that they will be able to run a serious campaign next year, let alone win seats. “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure.”

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