The rogues' gallery of German politics

Boris Palmer has announced he'll be taking some time off his job as the mayor of Tübingen, southern Germany, and leaving the Green Party, after getting into a bizarre altercation with protesters over his public use of the N-word. Often obsessively railing against what he calls "cancel culture," Palmer's voluntary exit from the party will have relieved its leaders, who had been trying to oust him.

She is her socialist party's most recognizable figure and also its biggest controversy magnet. Wagenknecht has gained a following among disaffected, "anti-establishment" voters on both the far left and far right. Her most recent campaign, in tandem with leading German feminist Alice Schwarzer, has seen her call for making peace with Russia despite its invasion of Ukraine.

The former head of Germany's domestic intelligence agency (BfV) was forced to step down in 2018 after he cast doubt on a viral video showing immigrants being attacked in the city of Chemnitz. Since then, he has come out as an opponent of Arab immigration and said "an eliminatory racism against white people" was shaping German politics. The CDU is now trying to eject him.

Even populists have populists: The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is still unsure what to do with Höcke. Considered a fascist by some, he remains a key figure for the so-called "Wing," a hardcore AfD group that the BfV declared a threat to Germany's democratic order and that may or may not have disbanded. The previous half-hearted attempts to remove him from the AfD have failed.

A former Social Democrat finance minister in Berlin state, Sarrazin created a controversy in 2010 with his bestseller "Deutschland schafft sich ab" (Germany is abolishing itself). He argued that Germany's prosperity was being threatened by undereducated Turkish and Arab immigrants. He clung to his party membership, and it took a tortuous legal battle for the SPD to finally kick him out in 2020.