Hundreds protest near Berlin as far-right AfD picks regional leader

Hundreds of protesters gathered in the north-eastern German town of Jüterborg on Saturday as the Berlin branch of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) picked its leader for next year's parliamentary election.

The anti-immigration party chose Beatrix von Storch to lead its list of candidates in the German capital for September's elections to the Bundestag, the country's lower house.

Von Storch, the party's deputy parliamentary leader in the Bundestag, previously led the AfD's campaign in Berlin in the 2017 and 2021 elections and received support from 87% of conference attendees to run again.

The AfD, founded in 2013 as a eurosceptic party that has since shifted its focus to immigration, currently seems well placed to garner its best result in national polls yet, after securing around 30% of the vote in recent elections to three state parliaments.

However, it faces a difficult battle to increase its 9.4% share of the vote in Berlin at the last national election.

The Berlin branch of the party was forced to move its members-only conference to Jüterborg, some 50 kilometres south of Berlin in the state of Brandenburg, after failing to find a venue in the capital.

Protesters gathered at Jüterborg station in the morning and marched towards the conference venue, the Wiesenhalle, carrying banners reading "No room for the AfD. No room for right-wing agitation" and "Together against fascism."

Rally organizers, an alliance of citizens' initiatives, unions and far-left groups based, put the number of participants at between 500 and 600.

The AfD is currently being monitored for suspected extreme political activity by the federal domestic intelligence agency, and certain state-level AfD associations have been classified as extremist.