BERLIN, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Frauke Petry, chairwoman of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), announced on Tuesday that she will leave the party just after it succeeded in entering the German Federal Parliament for the first time.
It was "clear" that her withdrawal from the AfD would follow, Petry told press without specifying a precise date. The move comes close on the heels of her surprising decision not to join the AfD's parliamentary faction in the culmination of a long-standing inner-party rift.
The anti-immigration and eurosceptical AfD was elected into the Bundestag, or the German Federal Parliament, on Sunday with 12.6 percent of the votes, becoming the third strongest party in Germany.
Several leading AfD politicians welcomed the increasingly-isolated chairwoman's declaration that she would become an independent delegate in parliament.
Despite expressing increasingly vocal criticism of her party colleagues for racially provocative comments on the campaign trail, Petry succeeded in obtaining a strong direct mandate for a legislative seat from voters in her Saxonian constituency.
Petry has repeatedly called for the AfD to adopt a more moderate conservative stance to improve its long-term political prospects and was hereby met with open hostility from the party's co-leader Joerg Meuthen, co-founder Alexander Gauland, as well as its lead candidate Alice Weidel.
Meuthen had publicly encouraged Petry to leave the party after she stormed out of the AfD electoral press conference during which she revealed her earlier decision not to join its parliamentary faction.
Marcus Pretzell, AfD regional leader in North-Rhine Westphalia and Petry's husband, also announced that he would leave the party.
