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Frankfurt. – The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party found itself under fire yesterday after a leading member made racist remarks about the national football team’s defender Jerome Boateng, forcing its leader to issue an apology.

The uproar was started by AfD’s deputy chief Alexander Gauland, who told the Sunday newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) that Germans would not like to live next door to Boateng, who has a Ghanaian father and was born and brought up in Berlin.

“People find him good as a footballer, but they don’t want to have a Boateng as a neighbour,” Gauland said.

On Sunday, the 75-year-old Gauland attempted to back track.

“I have never, as the FAS insinuates, insulted Mr Boateng,” he told German daily Bild. “I do not know him nor would I therefore have the idea to devalue him as a personality.”

The newspaper FAS put out a statement saying both of their reporters, who interviewed Gauland in Potsdam last Wednesday, had a record of his comments, which have drawn widespread condemnation.

AfD party chief Frauke Petry has tried to calm the storm, telling the mass-circulation daily Bild that Gauland “cannot recall whether he made that statement”.

“Independent of that, I apologise to Mr Boateng for the impression that arose,” she said.

And Petry subsequently tweeted: “Jerome Boateng is a super footballer who is rightly a member of the German national team. I’m looking forward to the European championships.”

Nevertheless, Gauland’s comments have fallen offside with key figures in German football and politics.

The president of the DFB German football league, Reinhard Grindel, slammed them as “simply tasteless”. Boateng, 27, “is an excellent player and a wonderful person, who gets involved in social causes and is a role model for many young people”.

The manager of the German national team, Oliver Bierhoff, said: “It isn’t the first time that we’ve been confronted with such statements. They need no comment. The people who made them are simply discrediting themselves.” – AFP