Far right AfD party says Muslims not welcome in Germany.
Afar-Right German party that is currently third in the national polls declared an openly anti-Muslim policy for the first time on Sunday.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party voted to adopt a controversial new manifesto that calls for a ban on minarets, veils for women and the Muslim call to prayer.
“Islam is not part of Germany,” the party declared in its first ever manifesto for national elections.
The decision has put the party on a collision course with Germany’s 4 million Muslims and raised fears over the resurgent far-Right.
The AfD stormed to its best ever results in regional elections in March, inflicting heavy losses on Angela Merkel’s party on a platform of opposition to her “open-door” refugee policy.
Its anti-migrant stance has transformed the party from a fringe group of Eurosceptics to a force to be reckoned with in German politics.
It is currenly third in the national polls with 13 per cent support, behind Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and her coalition partner the Social Democrats (SPD).
But the number of asylum-seekers has dropped sharply in recent weeks and the AfD has changed course.
At the party conference in Stuttgart, members decided to stake the party’s future on an openly anti-Muslim agenda.
“They gave us up for dead in the summer of 2015,” Frauke Petry, the party leader told delegates.
The AfD was more than a protest party, and could win elections, she claimed.
But the vote on the new manifesto was a personal defeat for Ms Petry just weeks after she led the party to its best ever results.
She had resisted pressure from the hardline wing of the party for the anti-Muslim message.
But delegates rejected a watered down version, which called to “stop Islamism but seek a dialogue with Islam”.
“Islam is itself political,” one delegate claimed in the debate.
A second claimed described Islam as “sharia, suicide bombings and forced marriages”.
The vote on the new manifesto came a day after some 400 people were arrested outside the conference after protests against the party turned violent.