Before becoming an AfD founding member Gauland was a member of the
CDU. In 2012 Gauland became involved in the ("Berlin circle"), a loose association of federal and state politicians within the CDU, which has been trying for years to make the CDU conservative again, because they consider that under Angela Merkel's leadership it has moved away from these ideals. He is a supporter of a line that is both
conservative on the societal level and
liberal on the economic level. He opposed the idea of an aid plan for
Greece, which was then plunged into an
economic crisis. He called for the closure of Germany's and the European Union's borders, targeting Muslims in particular. Alexander Gauland said he can not detect any right-wing extremists or radicals at the
PEGIDA-Demonstrations. Gauland said: "I do not see right-wing extremists. I see citizens who demonstrate out of concern about developments in Germany, who are afraid. But I haven't seen any right-wing extremists, and we are not the allies of the right-wing extremists, but we are the allies of the people who have these concerns." In May 2016, Gauland reportedly made comments about
Bayern Munich and black
German international footballer
Jérôme Boateng in a conversation with . The paper cited Gauland, "people like [Boateng] as a footballer, but they don't want to have a Boateng as a neighbour". A controversy arose about this sentence. Gauland defended himself, saying he was fooled by the newspaper and it had been a background discussion, which was classified as confidential and thus not intended for publication. The newspaper refuted this. Gauland added that the effect of the statement – which in his words was meant descriptive – was distorted by the headline of the newspaper, "Gauland insults Boateng" (). The newspaper had no audio recording of the statement, but independently written memos of two journalists. While Boateng himself stated that he was "saddened" by the statement of Gauland, the German federal government said it was "a vile and sad sentence" (). But also the FAS was criticised for making "mistakes". In September 2017, a video emerged of Gauland in which he said that Germany should "be proud of" its soldiers in both world wars and people should no longer "reproach" Germans for the
Second World War. He was quoted as saying: "If the French are rightly proud of their emperor and the Britons of
Nelson and
Churchill, we have the right to be proud of the achievements of the German soldiers in two
world wars". He continued, "If I look around Europe, no other people has dealt as clearly with their past wrongs as the Germans." In response, Germany's
justice minister tweeted that the statements showed that Gauland's AfD was on the
extreme right. Gauland's comment was defended by numerous right-leaning supporters both publicly and on social media. In 2018, Gauland said "Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history". ==Position in the AfD==