The European Union must “behave” or Germany will quit the bloc, the leader of the far-Right AfD party has threatened.

Alice Weidel, co-president of Alternative for Deutschland, claims the EU would not survive “Dexit” – the German version of Brexit – but her country would.

Ms Weidel also attacked other parties for refusing to go into coalition with the AfD after it triumphed in the eastern state of Thuringia on Sunday.

The party came a whisker from winning in another state, Saxony, in the best electoral results for the far Right in Germany since the rise of the Nazis.

“Germany, to survive, does not need the EU. The EU, in contrast, needs Germany. The EU needs to behave accordingly. Only under these conditions will Germany’s exit from the EU be rendered not necessary,” Ms Weidel  said.

EU ‘must respect our vital interests’

She told Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper: “Dexit, Germany’s departure from the EU, is for us a last resort. We don’t want to destroy things, we want to reform them.

“But that will happen only if our European partners understand that they must respect our vital interests.”

Ms Weidel said in January that Germany could hold a referendum on EU membership and that Brexit could be “a model” for the country.

Björn Höcke, the AfD’s leader in Thuringia, one of its strongholds in the former East Germany, sponsored a resolution to dissolve the EU in 2022.

The AfD was founded by Eurosceptic university professors but has since  become radicalised.

Mr Höcke has been convicted of using Nazi slogans and Germany’s domestic intelligence service has declared the AfD “proven Right-wing extremists”.

The AfD victory shook Olaf Scholz’s dysfunctional Left-leaning coalition a year before federal elections that the Chancellor is expected to lose to the centre-Right CDU.

However, all of the other parties in Thuringia have refused to enter into coalition agreements with the AfD in a “firewall” to keep the far Right from power.

‘Firewall’ makes threats toothless for now

Even if the AfD were to win the federal elections, a similar cordon sanitaire would be formed, meaning Ms Weidel’s threats of Dexit are toothless for now.

She said the firewall against the AfD was “profoundly antidemocratic” and warned the conservative CDU, which won in Saxony, against forming pacts with the Left.

“Isolating the AfD, which in Thuringia and Saxony represents more than 30 per cent of voters, would damage the democratic culture of our country,” she said.

“And it would ignore the clear will of the electorate for substantial political change.”

Ms Weidel claimed the pro-Russian AfD is “neither radical nor extremist”. “These are baseless accusations,” she added.