The former co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party faces a year in jail if convicted of perjury. She is to stand trial charged with giving false evidence about campaign financing.
The Dresden district court on October 23 said it would hear evidence against Frauke Petry.
As reported by Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster, the 43-year-old is accused of lying under oath in November 2015, when she and her fellow AfD member Carsten Hütter are alleged to have given conflicting testimony about the AfD candidate list and campaign financing for Saxony’s 2014 state election.
The election was the first that saw the AfD take seats in one of Germany’s state parliaments; it’s now represented in every state chamber bar one.
According to DW, Petry (who won a seat with the AfD in that election) has already admitted to a mistake in the evidence that she gave at the electoral oversight committee hearing in November 2015, but she said it was not intentional.
The accusations are in connection with loans that AfD candidates in Saxony gave to the far-right party to finance campaigning in the eastern state. The AfD was accused of taking a candidate off its list because he was not willing to give a loan to the party.
Frauke Petry resigned from AfD on 29 September 2017 and on October she formed a new party, called the Blue Party.
