Is the AfD Party Dissolving?

This is a complicated essay and I'll try to sort it out in bits and pieces.

First, at some point in 2019.....the German government voted and finally said that a continual overview (spy upon) needs to be established on the AfD Party.  So the German version of the FBI (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution) were given the orders to monitor the AfD Party.  It's a rare and unusual effort.

This party isn't a long standing party.  They started out in 2013 as the anti-Euro party, and that was their entire focus for the first two years.  At some point, they were actually doing kinda well....with a single focus on existence.  In the 2014 EU election.....they actually got a couple of seats at the EU parliament. 

Then along the midst of summer 2015.....with the refugee crisis in full focus....a collection of individuals arrived, and basically took over the party (kicking out the guy who started the party, Bernd Lucke).

From this point on, this was more than a anti-Euro party.....it was now a anti-refugee, and anti-migrant party.  If their numbers had stayed the same....no one would have said much (roughly 5-percent of the public voting).  But as weeks went by....they took public votes from all of the political parties, and the disenchanted folks who saw migration as a major negative.....had only one option....vote for AfD to settle the problems.

In the 2017 national election, they achieved 12.6 percent of the vote.  In some ways, they'd hurt both the CDU and SPD. 

So came various accusations of far-right extremism, and the machine to monitor the party was assembled. 

The insiders (the top twenty political members) are sharply divided.  It would appear that the majority would like to clean up the mess, and get the spying business halted.  So they are picking on the bigger far-right extremist, and asking them to exit.  Andreas Kalbitz is one of the ones who got fed up with the policy, and is exiting on his own.  In Thuringia (the state).....he's the head guy of the AfD Party.  Starting his own party?  He hasn't really said that.  Some folks suggest that he's merely doing a temporarily side-step and will return eventually.

All of this would suggest that the numbers for the AfD Party ought to go down (maybe back to the five to eight percent point) nationally.  But there's that problem with a fair number of Germans who just aren't supporting the migration plan. 

The German national election?  It's roughly 16 month away.  A lot can happen.  They might return to to the 12-percent level....they might sink on down to the five-percent level.  It's difficult to predict how this will end up.