How the anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic AfD party came from nowhere to shatter the German political order
In an election result which has shaken Europe to its core, the controversial Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has secured 88 out of 709 seats in the German Parliament.
GERMAN politician Alexander Gauland thinks his country is in danger of being lost "to an invasion of foreigners" and says Islam "does not belong in Germany".
And now, in an election result which has shaken Europe to its core, his controversial Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has secured 88 out of 709 seats in their national Parliament.
One of the senior figures in the right-wing party, Alexander Gauland is arguably the most divisive man in present-day Germany.
A staunch nationalist, the 76-year-old believes that his nation should stop shying away from its dark past, going so far as to claim that Germans should be "proud" of their soldiers' achievements in World War Two.
He is also a vocal critic of Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door policy for refugees.
The former lawyer and AfD co-founder said: “One million foreigners are being brought into this country and taking away a piece of this country and we in the AfD don't want that."
Gauland's views are so extreme that he has even been slammed for being a racist from within his own nationalist party.
In short, he is everything Germany insists it is not.
Responsible for AfD's sensational election campaign, he is one of the people who helped take AfD from a quiet fringe party to a rowdy political juggernaut.
And despite having fled Soviet-occupied East Germany to move to the West at the age of 18, he has no sympathy for today's refugees.
He said: "That is something else: I'm German. It is quite different when someone comes from Eritrea or Sudan. He has no right to the support of a foreigner. "
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His views on Islam and immigration are evident in the brash ad campaign which saw AfD billboards springing up all over the country - laying into Merkel's refugee policy and the Muslim religion.
One advert, depicting a pair of bikini-clad women on a beach, featured the slogan: "Burkas? We prefer bikinis."
Another controversial ad, showing a pregnant woman, which reads: "New Germans? We'll make them ourselves."
The bold adverts seem to have worked, with AfD coming in third place with 13 per cent of the vote in this week's election.
But beneath the surface, there's trouble brewing in Germany's most controversial political party.
Frauke Petry, the party's co-leader, sensationally quit just hours after AfD's incredible performance was announced.
Lashing out at Gauland, she accused her colleagues of condoning racism and turning AfD into an angry protest party.
It says a lot that Petry herself was responsible for shifting the party to the right when she seized control in 2015, putting immigration at the top of AfD's agenda.
And in January 2016, she caused a political storm of her own when she said that border police should be able to "use firearms if necessary" to keep illegal immigrants out of the country.
Her style had always been at odds with the moderate politics professor Jörg Meuthen, who she co-chaired the party with.
Meuthen's job was to keep the party appealing to more than just the people concerned with mass migration.
The problem with AfD's "racist" image was originally helped by Alice Weidel, a 38-year-old investment banker who represented the moderate wing of the party.
That was until she threw the party into chaos when an email leaked where she had described Germany as "overrun by culturally foreign people such as Arabs, Sinti and Roma."
She went on to describe the government as "puppets of WWII allies" in an emotive rant littered with German words which still have strong Nazi connotations.
But internal scuffles are nothing new for AfD.
The party has been marred by infighting ever since it was founded as a middle-class, anti-Euro protest party in 2013, when it was led by economist Bernd Lucke.
In the 2013 elections, the party won just 4.7 per cent of the vote - not enough to earn a single seat in parliament.
But today AfD is a different beast - and many Europeans are terrified at the nationalist tendencies of the first far-right group to sit in the German parliament since 1961.
German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has branded AfD "real Nazis", with second-place socialist Martin Schulz describing the party as "a shame for our nation."
But while its supporters would strongly contest any links to Nazism, nobody can deny that AfD's win marks a huge shift in Germany's post-war political landscape.