AfD faces embarrassment after running out of candidates in local elections

The nationalist Alternative for Germany party (AfD) is facing embarrassment after running out of candidates to fill local council seats.

Despite disappointing overall results in the European elections, the party performed well in the former communist east and won a landslide in local council elections held the same day in the state of Saxony.

But local AfD leaders have since admitted the party will not be able to fill all the council seats it won because it does not have enough candidates.

German elections are a complicated mix of the first-past-the-post system used in the UK and proportional representation.

In this case, seats on the local councils were allotted proportionally using a party list system. But the AfD didn’t have enough candidates on its list, so the seats were awarded to rival parties.

In one example in the town of Heidenau, the AfD won 29.5 per cent of the votes, entitling it to 7 seats on the local council.

But the party only fielded five candidates so the other two seats were awarded to Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU).

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“We should have the majority there, but now the CDU is ahead. Naturally this annoys me,” Ivo Teichmann, a regional AfD politician, told Bild newspaper.

Party officials blamed the debacle on the difficulty of finding candidates prepared to stand for the elections.

“Many potential candidates told us it would jeopardizes their social and professional lives if they stood for the AfD,” Jörg Urban, a local area chairman, said.

He cited the case of Uwe Vetterlein, who resigned as head of the Saxon Handball Association this week following controversy over his decision to stand as an AfD candidate in Dresden.

A team based in Leipzig had objected to what it called the “nationalist, discriminatory and anti-democratic views and populist language” of the AfD and demanded Mr Vetterlein stand down.

The AfD became the first nationalist party to sit in the German parliament since the sixties in 2017 after making dramatic gains campaigning on an anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim platform.

Its leader, Alexander Gauland, has described the crimes of the Nazis as a “speck of birds*** in 1,000 years of glorious German history”.

Another of its most prominent politicians has called for a “180-degree turn” in Germany’s culture of atonement for the crimes of the Second World War.