Alternative for Germany
Based on Wikipedia: Alternative for Germany
In February 2025, German intelligence officially classified a major political party as a "confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor." This wasn't some fringe group meeting in basements. This was the second-largest party in the German parliament, with over twenty percent of the national vote and one hundred fifty-one seats in the Bundestag. The party is called Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and its rise represents one of the most significant shifts in European politics since the end of the Cold War.
How does a country that has spent eighty years meticulously guarding against the return of far-right nationalism end up with such a party as its main opposition? The answer involves the Euro, a refugee crisis, the collapse of the Berlin Wall's lingering shadows, and a very German word: Alternativlosigkeit.
A Party Born from Currency Wars
The AfD didn't start as a nationalist movement. It started as an argument about money.
In September 2012, three men met in the spa town of Bad Nauheim. Alexander Gauland was a former newspaper editor and longtime member of Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union. Bernd Lucke was an economics professor. Konrad Adam was a journalist. They shared a conviction that Germany's policy toward the eurozone crisis was disastrously wrong.
At the time, the European Union was hemorrhaging. Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy teetered on the edge of financial collapse. Germany, as the eurozone's largest economy, was expected to bail them out. Merkel's government complied, pouring billions into rescue packages. The men in Bad Nauheim thought this was madness.
They called their new political group Electoral Alternative 2013, and their manifesto attracted prominent economists and business leaders. Their argument was straightforward: the euro had proven "unsuitable" as a common currency, and southern European countries were "sinking into poverty under the competitive pressure" of sharing money with Germany's export powerhouse economy.
This was, at its core, a disagreement about macroeconomics and monetary policy. Not immigration. Not Islam. Not nationalism. Just money.
The group formally became a political party on February 6, 2013. They needed a name, and they chose one that was a direct rebuke to Angela Merkel's favorite rhetorical device.
The Politics of No Alternative
Merkel had a habit of presenting her policies as the only possible choice. She used the word Alternativlosigkeit—"alternative-less-ness"—to describe everything from eurozone bailouts to refugee policy. It was her German version of Margaret Thatcher's famous declaration that "there is no alternative."
The new party's founders found this intolerable. Democracy, they argued, was supposed to be about choices. By naming themselves Alternative for Germany, they positioned themselves as the answer to Merkel's assertion that no answer existed.
In their first federal election, held in September 2013, the AfD won 4.7 percent of the vote. This might sound like a failure, but in German politics it was a near-miss of historic proportions. Germany has a five percent threshold: any party that falls short gets no seats in the Bundestag at all. The AfD had come within a fraction of a percent of entering parliament as a brand-new party focused on a single economic issue.
They'd attracted two million voters. Something was clearly resonating.
The European Parliament as Proving Ground
The AfD got its first real taste of power through an unusual door. In early 2014, Germany's Constitutional Court struck down the three percent threshold for European Parliament elections, meaning any party could win seats proportionally without a minimum vote share.
The party held a conference in January 2014 and chose a telling campaign slogan: Mut zu Deutschland, which translates to "Courage for Germany" or "Courage to stand up for Germany." They'd previously considered Mut zur Wahrheit—"Courage to speak the truth" or, more colloquially, "telling it like it is." The federal board worried this might sound too anti-European, so they compromised with a visual trick: they wrote the slogan as "MUT ZU D*EU*TSCHLAND," circling the letters "EU" with the twelve stars of the European flag.
It was a clever piece of graphic design that captured the party's conflicted identity: skeptical of the European Union but not yet ready to call for Germany's exit.
In May 2014, the AfD won seven seats in the European Parliament with 7.1 percent of the German vote. They joined the European Conservatives and Reformists group, the same faction that included Britain's Conservative Party. This caused some awkwardness between Angela Merkel and David Cameron, who was then Prime Minister. The British Conservatives had been quietly courting the AfD as a potential ally, even hosting their leader for a question-and-answer session at the Houses of Parliament.
The State-by-State Surge
While Berlin politicians debated whether the AfD was a serious threat, the party was methodically building power in Germany's sixteen states. German federalism gives significant authority to state governments, and state elections became the AfD's laboratory.
In August 2014, they won 9.7 percent in Saxony. A month later, they took 10.6 percent in Thuringia and 12.2 percent in Brandenburg. By February 2015, they'd broken through in the western state of Hamburg with 6.1 percent—their first seats in a state that had been part of West Germany.
But something was shifting inside the party. The economics professors and Euro-skeptics who had founded it were losing control to a more radical faction.
The Fracture
The tension came to a head in July 2015. After months of internal warfare and a cancelled party gathering, the AfD held a congress in Essen. The vote was for party leadership, and it wasn't close.
Frauke Petry, a chemist and businesswoman who represented the national-conservative wing, won sixty percent of the vote. Bernd Lucke, the economics professor who had co-founded the party just two years earlier, was humiliated.
Within a week, five of the party's seven European Parliament members quit. Lucke himself announced his resignation on July 8, 2015, citing what he called "the rise of xenophobic and pro-Russian sentiments" in the party he had created. He accused the new leadership of turning the AfD into a "Pegida party."
This requires explanation. Pegida—Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident—was a street movement that had emerged in Dresden in late 2014. Its weekly marches drew thousands of protesters opposed to immigration and what they saw as the spread of Islam in Germany. Pegida was nationalist, nativist, and populist. It was everything the AfD's founders had insisted their party was not.
Now, according to Lucke, it was exactly what the AfD had become.
He tried to start over. With other disaffected members, he formed the Alliance for Progress and Renewal, later renamed the Liberal Conservative Reformers. It went nowhere. The voters who had been drawn to the AfD weren't interested in currency policy anymore.
The Refugee Crisis Transforms Everything
In the summer of 2015, as Lucke was leaving and Petry was consolidating power, something happened that would reshape German politics for a generation.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees began arriving in Europe, fleeing war in Syria and instability across the Middle East and North Africa. In August, Angela Merkel made a decision that her critics still cite as the defining mistake of her chancellorship: she effectively suspended normal asylum procedures and announced that Germany would accept anyone who reached its borders.
The famous phrase attributed to her—"Wir schaffen das," meaning "We can do this"—became either an inspiring call for humanitarian generosity or evidence of dangerous naivety, depending on whom you asked.
Over the next year, Germany accepted more than one million refugees. The logistical challenges were immense. The cultural tensions were sometimes explosive. And the political consequences were transformative.
The AfD had found its issue.
In March 2016, state elections delivered stunning results. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD finished second with 24.2 percent of the vote. In Baden-Württemberg, they took third with 15.1 percent. In Rhineland-Palatinate, another third-place finish at 12.6 percent.
Most symbolically, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern—Angela Merkel's home state—the AfD beat her own Christian Democrats into third place with 20.8 percent of the vote. It was the first time the party had contested a state election there, and they immediately became one of its largest political forces.
The voter analysis told a complex story. The AfD wasn't just drawing from the right. Support for the Social Democrats dropped 4.9 percent. The Left party fell 5.2 percent. Even the Green party lost 3.9 percent. The far-right National Democratic Party saw its vote cut in half. The AfD was pulling voters from across the entire political spectrum—anyone who was angry, alienated, or afraid.
The Path to the Bundestag
In September 2017, the AfD finally crossed the threshold that had eluded them four years earlier. They won 12.6 percent of the national vote and ninety-four seats in the Bundestag, making them the third-largest party in Germany and, crucially, the largest opposition party.
This status mattered enormously. German parliamentary tradition gives the largest opposition party significant privileges and speaking time. The AfD's leaders—Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel—now had a platform that reached every German living room during televised debates.
The party's platform had evolved far beyond currency skepticism. They now campaigned against immigration, against Islam specifically, against the European Union more broadly, and for closer ties with Vladimir Putin's Russia. They questioned the scientific consensus on climate change. They embraced what political scientists call "welfare chauvinism"—the idea that Germany's generous social programs should be reserved for Germans.
The Eastern Question
Look at a map of AfD support and a pattern emerges immediately. The party is strongest in the states that were once East Germany: Saxony, Thuringia, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. In the 2021 federal election, the AfD won 20.5 percent of the vote in former East Berlin. In the western part of the city, they managed just 8.4 percent.
Why would voters in the former communist bloc gravitate toward a far-right party?
The explanation involves economics, identity, and unfinished reunification. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, West Germany essentially absorbed East Germany. The economic transition was brutal. Factories closed. Unemployment soared. Young people fled westward. Entire towns hollowed out.
Thirty-five years later, the scars remain. Wages in the east are still lower. Wealth is still concentrated in the west. Many eastern Germans feel like second-class citizens in their own country—ignored by Berlin elites, dismissed as provincial, lectured about values by westerners who never experienced communism.
The AfD speaks directly to these resentments. They frame immigration as another example of Berlin imposing policies on communities that don't want them. They present multiculturalism as a western project being forced onto eastern Germans who never voted for it.
Political scientists also note a more troubling pattern: some research suggests eastern German voters show a "propensity for strongman rule," perhaps a lingering effect of four decades under authoritarian government. The AfD's rhetoric—certainty, strength, rejection of liberal consensus—may appeal to voters who distrust the messiness of democratic compromise.
Surveillance and Classification
Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (its German abbreviation is BfV), exists specifically to monitor threats to German democracy. Its creation after World War II reflected the lesson that democracies can destroy themselves from within if they ignore warning signs.
The BfV began watching parts of the AfD in 2018. Various state-level branches were placed under surveillance. The party's youth wing, called the Young Alternative, was being monitored closely.
In January 2022, something remarkable happened. Jörg Meuthen, who was at that point one of the AfD's co-chairmen, resigned from the party he had helped lead. His explanation was damning. The AfD, he said, had "moved far to the right with totalitarian traits" and was "in large parts no longer based on the liberal democratic basic order."
This was an extraordinary statement. A party chairman was publicly accusing his own organization of abandoning democracy.
In 2023, the BfV officially classified the Young Alternative as a "confirmed extremist organization." Then, in 2025, came the most significant designation yet: the entire AfD was labeled a "confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor."
This classification has real consequences. It allows German authorities to use informants, monitor communications, and increase surveillance. It signals to German society that the state's intelligence apparatus views this party—the second-largest in parliament—as a genuine threat to constitutional order.
Connections and Accusations
The BfV's concerns aren't abstract. Various AfD state associations and factions have been linked to movements that exist on the far edges of German politics.
Pegida remains the most visible connection. The organization's rallies in Dresden drew tens of thousands at their peak, and AfD politicians have appeared at Pegida events despite official party unease.
The Neue Rechte—the "New Right"—is a network of intellectuals, publishers, and activists who have worked for decades to make far-right ideas respectable in Germany. They draw on thinkers like the French philosopher Alain de Benoist and the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt (who notoriously provided legal justifications for Nazi power). The Neue Rechte doesn't advocate explicit Nazi ideology; instead, they promote concepts like "ethnopluralism," the idea that ethnic groups should remain separate to preserve their distinct cultures. Critics argue this is simply racism dressed in academic language.
The Identitarian movement, which originated in France and spread across Europe, promotes similar ideas with flashier tactics—banner drops, confrontational protests, social media campaigns. German Identitarians have been linked to AfD politicians and staff.
Perhaps most sensitive in the German context are accusations of historical revisionism. Any politician who seems to minimize Nazi crimes, question German war guilt, or rehabilitate figures from the Third Reich triggers immediate alarm in a country that has made "never again" a constitutional principle.
Several AfD figures have made statements that critics describe as exactly this kind of revisionism. The party leadership has distanced itself from some remarks while defending others as legitimate debate. Internal divisions remain about how closely to associate with movements that mainstream German politics considers beyond the pale.
The Austrian Connection
In February 2016, the AfD announced a formal cooperation pact with Austria's Freedom Party, known by its German initials FPÖ. This was significant because the FPÖ had a far longer history and much clearer far-right roots.
The Freedom Party was founded in 1956 by former Nazis, including Anton Reinthaller, a former SS officer. It spent decades as a minor party before being transformed in the 1980s by Jörg Haider, a charismatic leader who combined anti-immigrant rhetoric with economic populism. When the FPÖ joined Austria's governing coalition in 2000, the European Union imposed diplomatic sanctions on Austria—an unprecedented response to a member state's internal politics.
The AfD's alliance with the FPÖ accelerated its departure from mainstream European conservatism. The European Conservatives and Reformists group, which had reluctantly accepted the AfD in 2014, moved to expel them. Beatrix von Storch, one of the two remaining AfD members in the European Parliament, left voluntarily to join the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group, a Eurosceptic faction. Marcus Pretzell waited to be formally expelled.
The AfD had burned its bridges with the respectable right.
The Party's Policy Universe
Understanding what the AfD actually believes requires mapping their positions across multiple dimensions.
On immigration, the party wants strict limits on who can enter Germany, particularly from Muslim-majority countries. They advocate for rapid deportation of those denied asylum, border controls that supersede European Union rules, and skepticism toward the idea that integration of large migrant populations is possible or desirable.
On Islam specifically, the AfD has described it as incompatible with German culture. They've proposed banning minarets on mosques, prohibiting the call to prayer, and restricting Islamic religious instruction in schools. Critics call this religious discrimination; the party frames it as defending Germany's Christian heritage and secular values.
On the European Union, the AfD has evolved from wanting reform to wanting Germany's exit. They view Brussels as undemocratic, bureaucratic, and hostile to national sovereignty. They opposed COVID-era recovery funds that transferred money to southern European countries.
On Russia, the party has consistently called for closer relations with Moscow. They opposed sanctions after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and have criticized German military support for Ukraine. Some AfD politicians have made friendly visits to Moscow. This pro-Russia stance is particularly contentious given Germany's historical relationship with Russia and the ongoing war in Ukraine.
On climate change, the AfD rejects the scientific consensus that human activity is causing global warming. They oppose Germany's Energiewende—the transition away from fossil fuels—as economically destructive and based on flawed science. They want to continue using coal and nuclear power.
On social policy, the party combines defense of traditional welfare programs for Germans with opposition to what they consider excessive spending on immigrants. This "welfare chauvinism" appeals to voters who support the social safety net but resent seeing it extended to newcomers.
Völkisch Nationalism
Political scientists frequently describe the AfD using a German word that has very specific historical resonance: völkisch. Explaining this term requires a brief detour into history.
In German, Volk simply means "people" or "nation." But völkisch carries darker connotations. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, völkisch movements promoted the idea that the German nation was a mystical community bound by blood, soil, and spiritual essence—not merely by citizenship or shared institutions.
Völkisch nationalists believed in an essential German identity that transcended politics. They were suspicious of liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and anything that diluted the supposed purity of the German people. Jews were viewed as permanently alien regardless of how long their families had lived in Germany or how integrated they appeared.
The Nazi party drew heavily on völkisch ideology. After 1945, the word became taboo in mainstream German politics.
When scholars describe the AfD as incorporating völkisch nationalism, they mean that some currents within the party echo these historical patterns: defining Germanness by ancestry rather than citizenship, viewing immigration as an existential threat to national identity, and treating cultural homogeneity as a political goal.
The AfD's leadership officially rejects accusations of racism and disputes these characterizations. But the party contains different factions, and the tensions between more moderate voices and the explicitly völkisch current have never been resolved.
Electoral Peak
The AfD's performance in the 2021 federal election initially looked like a setback. They dropped from third place to fifth, falling behind the traditional parties as German politics recentered around the question of who would succeed Angela Merkel.
But the eastern pattern held. In the states of the former East Germany, the AfD remained formidable. They were building something durable, even as they lost ground nationally.
Then came the 2025 federal election. The AfD received 20.8 percent of the vote—their highest total ever—and finished in second place behind the conservative CDU/CSU alliance. They were no longer an insurgent force testing whether they could clear the five percent threshold. They were the main alternative to whoever governed Germany.
In the twenty-first Bundestag, with one hundred fifty-one seats, they became the largest opposition party. The founders who had argued about currency policy in a spa town twelve years earlier could not have imagined this outcome.
The European Pattern
The AfD's rise mirrors developments across Europe. France has the National Rally, formerly the National Front. Italy has the Brothers of Italy, whose leader now serves as prime minister. Hungary's Fidesz party has governed for over a decade while systematically dismantling democratic institutions. Poland's Law and Justice party followed a similar trajectory until losing power in 2023.
Each country's far-right movement has distinct characteristics, but common themes emerge: opposition to immigration, skepticism of the European Union, cultural conservatism, and claims to represent the "real" people against out-of-touch elites.
Germany's version is particularly significant because of the country's size, economic power, and historical burden. When the largest economy in Europe and the nation responsible for the Holocaust produces a far-right party with twenty percent support, the rest of the continent pays attention.
The Cordon Sanitaire
German politics has operated for years under an unwritten rule: no mainstream party will form a coalition with the AfD. This approach, borrowed from the French treatment of the National Front, is called a cordon sanitaire—a quarantine line that isolates the far right from power even when they win substantial votes.
So far, the cordon has held. Despite their second-place finish in 2025, the AfD was excluded from coalition negotiations. They govern in no German state. Every other party treats them as beyond the bounds of acceptable partnership.
But democratic exclusion creates its own tensions. AfD voters increasingly feel that the political system is rigged against them. Their party wins elections and gets nothing—no ministries, no influence on policy, no share of power. This feeds the narrative that Germany's establishment parties form a single "cartel" united only by fear of the populist challenger.
How long the cordon can hold is an open question. If the AfD continues to grow, eventually some politician may decide that working with them offers more benefits than the stigma costs. It happened in Austria with the FPÖ. It happened in Italy with various far-right parties. Germany's exceptionalism—the idea that its unique history makes such an accommodation impossible—will be tested.
What the AfD Reveals
The AfD exists because millions of German voters believe that mainstream parties have failed them. Some are motivated by economic anxiety, others by cultural fears, others by a genuine rejection of liberal values. Some are nostalgic for an imagined past. Some are simply angry.
The party's evolution—from currency skeptics to nationalist populists—reflects how political movements can be captured and transformed. Bernd Lucke wanted to argue about the euro. He created a vehicle that others drove in directions he never intended.
The intelligence classification as an extremist endeavor represents Germany's attempt to draw a line. There are parties, and then there are threats to democracy. The AfD, in the state's judgment, has crossed from one category to the other.
Whether that judgment is correct, whether surveillance and classification will reduce the AfD's appeal or increase it, whether Germany's democratic institutions are strong enough to contain a movement that forty percent of voters in some eastern regions support—these questions don't have answers yet. They are being answered, election by election, in a country still wrestling with the consequences of what happened when democracy failed there once before.