While Friedrich Merz’s conservative party won the German elections on Sunday, the limelight was stolen by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) party, which doubled its share of the vote to come second.
The Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) secured victory with nearly 28.6 per cent of the vote, followed by Alternative for Germany (AfD), which won 20.8 per cent.
This marked a massive surge in support for the AfD, which nearly doubled its support from the 12.6 per cent it secured in 2021.
Merz’s priority will be to form a government with the third-placed Social Democrats (SPD), led by Germany’s current Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, which secured its lowest ever proportion of the vote since the Second World War (16.4 per cent).
Here, The i Paper explores what the AfD’s rising popularity means for its opposition in Germany as well as the EU, Ukraine and Nato.
The AfD was born as a Eurosceptic party in 2013 after the financial crisis, opposing Germany’s efforts to economically bail out countries in the European Union including Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain.
The AfD previously endorsed political asylum for the persecuted, avoiding harsh anti-immigrant or anti-Islam rhetoric. However, it has since shifted its agenda, promoting hardline, far-right views to tap into growing concern over Germany’s rising immigrant and Muslim population.
The influx of refugees – many from Syria – entering the EU during the 2015-16 “migrant crisis” marked a tipping point for the AfD’s political success, Dan Hough, Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex, told The i Paper.
“[The AfD] only really started to threaten the other parties post 2015-16 when Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors to over a million asylum seekers from north Africa and the Middle East.
“That was the tipping point. It was then that the AfD started to steadily move rightwards and indeed to become the populist, anti-immigration actor that we see today.”
The AfD’s shift to the right created a chasm in the party, with senior members, including the party’s founder, Bernd Lucke, leaving in protest.
This shift has been expedited by a series of deadly attacks in Germany carried out by migrants in recent months, in the cities of Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg, Munich and Berlin.
A week before the election, a mentally unwell Afghan man attacked a group of children with a knife at a park in Aschaffenburg near the city of Frankfurt. He killed a two-year-old boy and a 41-year-old man who tried to protect him.
Weeks earlier, six people were killed in the city of Magdeburg after a Saudi-born man rammed a car into a crowd of Christmas shoppers, killing six people and injuring dozens more.
Last week a 19-year-old Syrian man stabbed a tourist near Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial.
The attacks sparked public outrage and calls for stricter migration policies.
Ahead of the election, Merz broke a longstanding political taboo when his proposals to tighten asylum policies narrowly passed in the Bundestag with backing from the AfD.
The AfD has also recently embraced the controversial concept of “remigration” – widely understood to mean the mass “return” or deportation of people from a migrant background – which the party had previously rejected.
Last month, Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, backed the “large-scale repatriations”, telling a conference: “I have to be honest with you: if it’s going to be called remigration, then that’s what it’s going to be: remigration.”
Weidel’s comments marked a departure from her attempt to distance herself from a scandal centred around the highly controversial concept in early 2024.
After it emerged that senior AfD figures had been among those present at a meeting where “remigration” was allegedly discussed with Martin Sellner, an Austrian far-right activist who has a neo-Nazi past, anti-AfD demonstrations took place across the country.
However, according to Tarik Abou-Chadi, Professor of European Union and Comparative European Politics at the University of Oxford, the AfD’s success partly stems from the normalisation of its radical stance on immigration by the gradual shift of all parties to the right.
“One important aspect to understand the success of the AfD is its normalisation through the behaviour of other parties,” Professor Abou-Chadi said. “Over the last three years the SPD [Social Democratic Party] and CDU moved strongly right on immigration. This has normalised the AfD and its positions.
“It has not helped to win voters back from them but on the contrary has helped the AfD to be in a much better position.”
The party’s success has also been fuelled by growing discontent over the country’s stagnating economy and political turmoil.
Sunday’s election took place seven months before it was originally planned after Scholz’s coalition collapsed in November – three years into a term that was increasingly marred by infighting, not least about how to reignite the economy.
Germany’s economy has shrunk for the past two years following the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which left Germany particularly vulnerable thanks to its reliance on Russian gas.
“In these circumstances it’s easy for a populist actor to play its cards,” Professor Hough said. “That’s precisely what the AfD has done.”
However, the negative economic impacts of its agenda have already been felt in regions where the party has achieved power, Christoph Meyer, Professor of European and International Politics at King’s College London, said.
“The AfD dominance in the east of Germany is already a drag on German economic growth and productivity in some of these parts as many highly skilled migrants and also many Germans think twice about moving there for work,” he told The i Paper.
“Indeed, a key challenge are the divergent voting pattern between west and east Germany, making the AfD the largest party in all of eastern Germany except for Berlin and one small area around it.”
Professor Meyer said that this divergence indicated different “identity constructions, collective memory and experiences of reunification” since the Second World War.
Having been founded in opposition to the EU, particularly its economic policies, the party still maintains a strong anti-EU stance, taking issues with its power over national governments.
The AfD’s draft election manifesto, sent to its members ahead of a vote in its party conference in early January, said: “We consider it necessary for Germany to leave the European Union and to establish a new European community.”
Weidel has since endorsed the policy, backing a “referendum on ‘Dexit’ – a German exit from the EU,” in an interview with the Financial Times.
She said the party wants to reform the EU and limit the European Commission’s power, but “if such a reform is not possible, if we cannot restore the sovereignty of the EU member states, then the citizens should decide, just like in the UK”.
AfD politicians have also endorsed dismantling EU climate policies, scrapping the euro to restore the deutschmark and shutting its borders in opposition to the bloc’s Schengen Area rules.
“It’s the most pro-Russian party in the Bundestag,” Professor Hough told The i Paper.
“It would not put it in those terms, but there is a clear, consistent willingness to parrot Russian propaganda. There’s subsequently a reluctance to wholeheartedly support Ukraine, and indeed any of the institutions of the international community.”
Germany is Ukraine’s second-biggest weapons supplier, behind the US.
Senior AfD members have called for an end or reduction in German military aid for Ukraine through various measures.
“There is talk, for example, of only allowing weapons to be sent to Ukraine with UN approval,” Professor Hough said. “Which, of course, is all a bit ridiculous, as Russia has a veto in the security council!”
Although the AfD’s vote share has doubled since the 2021 elections, Professor Meyer deems it unlikely that the party will ever assume leadership in government.
“The AFD is unlikely to form a majority government or even enter a coalition government at the federal level but may be difficult to keep out of power at the regional- state level,” he said.
But even without an absolute majority, the AfD could create a “blocking minority for major decisions at the federal level, including changes to the German constitution requiring a two-thirds majority, if they are supported in their vote by the left”, Professor Meyer said.
“There are many ways of exercising power even if you do not win a majority -people often forget that Hitler’s NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Part) only won 18 per cent in 1930 and 33 per cent in the last free elections in 1932.
“Against this historical background, the German constitution has created a mechanism in article 21 (2-4) by which parties can be declared as hostile to the constitution and as such abolished – or at least cut off from Germany state party financing. The latter happened with the NPD [the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany] whereas two other parties were disbanded following such a decision many decades ago.
“I expect to see stronger calls from within Germany to go down that route but the result is uncertain – just starting the process may already have a moderating influence.”
The rise of the AfD has sparked concern, given Germany’s history of authoritarianism and Nazism during the 30s and 40s.
Far-right movements have widely been stigmatised and treated as pariahs in the decades since.
“While there’s a long history of overreacting to any sign of the far right rising in Germany”, Tim Bale, Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London, said that “this time it really is serious.
“Not least because the AfD isn’t simply a radical right-wing populist party of the kind we see all over Europe: unlike most of them, it hasn’t done as much to try and break with its more extreme elements.”
The party has been embroiled in several scandals linking it to Nazism.
One example was when Maximilian Krah, the AfD’s lead candidate for the European elections, told an Italian newspaper that members of the Nazi SS were not necessarily “criminals”. The party subsequently expelled him.
The AfD has even been under surveillance by German domestic intelligence services for pursuing “goals that run against the human dignity of certain groups and against democracy”.
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