Alexander Gauland  Eberhardt Alexander Gauland (born 20 February 1941) is a right-wing German politician, journalist and lawyer who has served as leader of the German political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the Bundestag since September 2017 and co-leader of the party from December 2017 to November 2019. He has been a Member of the Bundestag (MdB) since September 2017. Gauland was the party's co-founder and was its federal spokesman from 2017 to 2019 and the party leader for the state of Brandenburg from 2013 to 2017. Gauland was born in 1941 in Chemnitz, a city that became part of East Germany in 1949 and was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt. After graduating from high school in 1959, he fled as a refugee to West Germany. He studied political science and law at Marburg, where he also received his doctorate. In 1972, Gauland entered the Federal Press Office and worked as the Director of the Office of the Mayor of Frankfurt am Main for 10 years. Afterwards, he became the head of a department of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety in Bonn and Member of the Hessian Prime Minister´s cabinet. From 1991–2006, he worked as an editor of the local newspaper Märkische Allgemeine in Potsdam. On the morning of 25 March 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel publicly promised there would be no direct financial aid to Greece, but reversed that statement hours later by agreeing with the leaders of the Euro countries to send the first of many "rescue packages" to Greece. Gerd Robanus, Assessor in the Federal Executive of the CDU-Business Association cited this as the reason for founding the "Election Alternative 2013" together with Alexander Gauland, Konrad Adam and Bernd Lucke. In February 2014, Gauland received about 80 percent of the vote during an Extraordinary National Congress in Diedersdorf, becoming chairman of the Brandenburg County Association of the right-wing Alternative for Germany. The AfD got 12.2 percent of the vote in the 2014 Brandenburg state election, enabling it to enter the assembly of that state for the first time. On Tuesday, 10 July 2014 Gauland opened the inaugural session of the Landtag of Brandenburg:  As part of this speech, after quoting Edmund Burke, Gauland wished the other members of parliament "all the strength and the courage, to tackle the tasks now ahead of them, in the interest of the voters and in the interest of the common good".