The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on Sunday chose a tough-talking former member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives and an economist to lead its campaign for a September election in a line-up likely to drag the group further right.
The party had stolen voters from Merkel during the migrant crisis but now looks less of a threat on 8-10 percent in polls after bleeding a third of its support as the refugee influx has slowed, infighting damages its image and a controversy about how to deal with Germany's Nazi past deters voters.
A majority of AfD delegates at a congress in the western city of Cologne backed 76-year-old publicist Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel, a 38-year-old former investment banker, as candidates fronting the party's bid to win seats in the national parliament for the first time in a September 24 election.
The vote followed a surprise announcement on Wednesday by co-leader Frauke Petry, the party's public face, that she would not lead the AfD's election campaign. This could boost mainstream parties and lessen the threat the AfD poses to Merkel's bid for a fourth term.
Gero Neugebauer, a Berlin-based political expert, said the choice of candidates would not boost the party's prospects because most AfD members did not vote based on the people representing it as they have no chance of power. But the duo chosen signalled the party was shifting further right, he said.
"Both people represent the AfD as a party that wants to present itself as middle-class, conservative and economically liberal but which is in essence a party that is moving further to the right," Neugebauer said.
Gauland is widely seen as a supporter of senior AfD member Bjoern Hoecke, who caused outrage in January by calling Berlin's Holocaust Memorial a "monument of shame" and demanding a "180 degree turnaround" in Germany's attempts to atone for Nazi crimes.
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