Germany's AfD: The Party That Shook the Postwar Order

In the late summer of 2026, something that German political analysts long feared but struggled to prevent came to pass: a far-right party won a German state election outright. On September 6, 2026, the Alternative für Deutschland — AfD — secured 43.8 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, the strongest performance ever recorded by a far-right party in a German state election. For a country whose constitutional and moral architecture was explicitly designed to prevent the recurrence of fascism, the result was a seismic shock. It was also the culmination of a thirteen-year journey that transformed the AfD from a niche Eurosceptic protest party into the most formidable political force in the country's east and a serious contender for national power. Understanding the AfD is not merely an exercise in political science; it is an attempt to understand what is happening to liberal democracy itself.

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Origins: A Party Born in the Euro Crisis

The AfD did not begin as a far-right party. It was founded on April 14, 2013, in Berlin, by a group of economists, journalists, and conservative intellectuals who were united by a single concern: Germany's financial exposure to the failing economies of southern Europe.

At its inception, the party's animating force was Bernd Lucke, a professor of economics at the University of Hamburg. Lucke, alongside co-founders Konrad Adam — a conservative journalist — and Alexander Gauland, a former official in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), built the AfD as a vehicle for what they saw as fiscally responsible opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel's support for eurozone bailouts, particularly of Greece. The founders argued that these bailouts violated the fiscal discipline principles embedded in the euro's founding architecture and unfairly burdened German taxpayers.

In its first iteration, the AfD was a party of economics professors and ordoliberal thinkers, not of street-level nationalism. It narrowly missed the five-percent threshold required to enter the Bundestag in the September 2013 federal election, receiving 4.7 percent — a near-miss that nonetheless established the party as a real electoral presence. In the 2014 European Parliament elections, it cleared the threshold and entered the European Parliament for the first time.

The transformation came swiftly. As the European migration crisis of 2015 displaced millions of people from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the AfD found a far more potent grievance to exploit. When Merkel opened Germany's borders, welcoming over a million asylum seekers in a matter of months, the AfD pivoted sharply. Lucke — whose profile was that of a technocratic economist uncomfortable with identity politics — found himself outmaneuvered by the party's nationalist wing. He was ousted at the party congress in July 2015 and went on to found a short-lived breakaway Eurosceptic party. He was replaced as leader by Frauke Petry, a chemist and entrepreneur with a harder edge on immigration.

Under Petry, the party's platform shifted decisively: from Euroscepticism and fiscal conservatism toward anti-immigration populism, cultural nationalism, and hostility toward Islam. By 2017, the AfD entered the Bundestag for the first time, winning 12.6 percent of the vote and 94 seats. It was the first time a party to the right of the CDU/CSU had entered the federal parliament since the 1950s. Petry herself departed immediately after the election, citing the party's increasingly extreme rhetoric. In her wake, the AfD's most radical figures consolidated power.

Ideology and Platform

The AfD resists easy classification but sits firmly within the tradition of right-wing populism, national conservatism, Euroscepticism, and — in the assessment of Germany's domestic intelligence service — ethnonationalist extremism. The party's core ideology rests on a völkisch conception of the German nation: the belief that German identity is inseparable from ethnicity and ancestry, that citizenship cannot meaningfully be conferred on those whose roots lie elsewhere, and that the presence of large non-European populations constitutes an existential threat to German culture.

Immigration and "Remigration"

Immigration has been the AfD's central electoral weapon since 2015. At its campaign kickoff rally in January 2025, AfD chancellor candidate Alice Weidel vowed to implement "large-scale repatriations" — the term the party uses is Remigration, a word borrowed from the European far-right that refers to the forced or coerced return of immigrants and, in the AfD's framing, even naturalized citizens of non-European descent. The party advocates a return to blood-based citizenship (jus sanguinis), insisting that German nationality can only be transmitted by ancestry rather than through birthplace or naturalization.

The AfD also calls for separate schools for refugee children, drastically reduced asylum applications, and the reimposition of border controls — many of which were already partially adopted by the Merz government, which critics argue has been dragged rightward by the AfD's electoral pressure.

Russia and Ukraine

The AfD's position on Russia is distinctive and has attracted scrutiny from Western intelligence services. The party calls for the immediate lifting of sanctions against Russia, opposes German weapons deliveries to Ukraine, and has proposed introducing free Russian-language lessons in schools. Its "Vision 2026" document advocates normalization of relations with Moscow and frames Germany's support for Ukraine as a costly and unnecessary conflict driven by American strategic interests.

This pro-Russian tilt is not merely ideological. As detailed below, senior AfD figures have faced criminal investigation over alleged payments from Russian and Chinese sources.

Economic Policy

Despite abandoning its founding Eurosceptic economics, the AfD has retained some economically heterodox positions. The party opposes Germany's climate transition policies and has called for the abandonment of the Energiewende, the country's renewable-energy transition. It supports the reversal of Germany's nuclear phase-out, arguing that cheap domestic energy is essential for industrial competitiveness. On social welfare, it has moved toward economic nationalism, supporting protections for German workers while opposing what it frames as the diversion of welfare resources toward migrants.

Anti-Islamism and Cultural Conservatism

The AfD views Islam not as a religion but as a "political ideology incompatible with the Basic Law," Germany's constitution. It calls for a ban on minarets, the prohibition of the full-face veil, and restrictions on the construction of mosques. The party aligns itself with Christian heritage as a defining element of German identity, though this is largely cultural rather than theological.

Key Figures

Alice Weidel

Alice Weidel is perhaps the most strategically significant figure in contemporary AfD politics. Co-leader of the party alongside Tino Chrupalla, she served as the AfD's chancellor candidate in the February 2025 federal election. Weidel is a former Goldman Sachs banker with a doctorate from the University of Bayreuth who spent years working in China and is in a same-sex partnership — a biographical profile that sits in awkward tension with the AfD's socially conservative platform, which she largely endorses nonetheless.

Weidel has been the face of the AfD's international rebranding effort. In January 2025, she appeared in a high-profile livestreamed conversation with Elon Musk on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), in which Musk directly endorsed the AfD and called it "the best hope for Germany." She also met in Munich with US Vice President JD Vance at the February 2025 Munich Security Conference — a meeting that drew accusations from the Berlin government of election interference. Vance, in his conference address, directly attacked the concept of the Brandmauer — the "firewall" by which mainstream German parties pledged not to cooperate with the AfD — calling it a betrayal of democratic principles.

Björn Höcke

No figure more completely embodies the AfD's most radical faction than Björn Höcke, the chair of the party's Thuringia branch. A former history teacher, Höcke has made himself the ideological center of what internal critics called the Flügel (Wing) — an explicitly ethnonationalist network within the AfD that the BfV classified as a right-wing extremist organization before the broader party-wide designation followed.

Höcke is best known internationally for calling Berlin's Holocaust Memorial a "monument of shame" and demanding a "180-degree turn" in Germany's approach to its Nazi past. He has been convicted in German courts for using prohibited Nazi-era slogans. In 2024, he led the AfD to a historic first-place finish in the Thuringia state election, securing 32.8 percent of the vote — the first time a far-right party had placed first in a German state election since the Nazi era. He did not become minister-president, however, as mainstream parties refused to enter coalition with him.

Tino Chrupalla

Tino Chrupalla, a painting contractor from Saxony, co-leads the AfD alongside Weidel at the national level. He represents the party's working-class eastern German base and is associated with its pro-Russia foreign policy positions. His profile is less polished than Weidel's but speaks directly to the AfD's core eastern electorate.

Alexander Gauland

A founding member and former professor of political science, Alexander Gauland served as the party's honorary chairman. Despite his genteel public manner and academic background, Gauland made some of the AfD's most notorious statements, including referring to the twelve years of Nazi rule as a "bird shit" compared to the sweep of German history — a remark that summarized the party's effort to rehabilitate German national pride by relativizing its Nazi past.

Electoral History and Rise to Power

The AfD's electoral trajectory is one of the most dramatic in postwar European politics.

The geographic pattern of AfD support is pronounced. In the 2025 federal election, the party won 34.5 percent in eastern Germany — nearly double its 17.9 percent in the west. This east-west divide has deep structural roots: eastern Germany experienced severe population loss through internal emigration after reunification, leaving behind communities that feel economically abandoned, culturally dismissed, and politically unrepresented by Berlin's mainstream consensus. Academic research published in peer-reviewed journals has identified population decline and the sense of demographic and economic "shrinkage" as significant predictors of AfD support in eastern constituencies.

The party also performs strongly among young men. In the 2025 federal election, the AfD ranked among the most popular parties for 18- to 24-year-olds, securing 21 percent of the youth vote — a trend that researchers have linked to online radicalization, dissatisfaction with climate policies, and perceived elite condescension.

The "Firewall" and the Coalition Question

Perhaps the most important political fact about the AfD is not its vote share but the Brandmauer — the firewall — that has kept it from governing. Since the party's emergence as a force, every major German party has pledged not to enter coalition with it, treating it as beyond the pale of democratic cooperation. This consensus, rooted in postwar Germany's commitment to anti-extremism and constitutional democracy, has meant that even when the AfD places first in elections, it has been unable to form governments.

The Thuringia result of 2024 illustrated this clearly: despite winning the plurality, Höcke could not become minister-president because no other party would join a coalition with him. A CDU-led government was eventually formed after protracted negotiations.

The Saxony-Anhalt result of September 2026 pushed this logic to its breaking point. The AfD's 43.8 percent translated to 39 of 83 seats — three short of an outright majority. With the Brandmauer holding, the remaining 44 seats were distributed among parties who collectively refused to work with the AfD. Analysts began exploring whether the left-wing BSW (Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht), which shares the AfD's skepticism of Ukraine aid and of liberal migration policy, might eventually break ranks and enable AfD governance. As of early September 2026, that step had not been taken.

At the federal level, Chancellor Friedrich Merz — leading a CDU/CSU-SPD coalition formed after the February 2025 election — has maintained a strict refusal to cooperate with the AfD. But the September 2026 state elections are expected to weaken Merz's coalition further and have triggered questions about how long the Brandmauer can hold as AfD support continues to grow nationally.

The Extremism Designation and Legal Battles

The AfD's relationship with Germany's legal and intelligence apparatus has become one of the defining stories of German politics.

In May 2025, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) — Germany's domestic intelligence service — formally designated the AfD as a "confirmed right-wing extremist organization." This was an unprecedented act: the first time any party with Bundestag representation had been classified in this way. The BfV cited the party's ethnic conception of German nationhood, its discriminatory rhetoric toward immigrants and minorities, and what it characterized as systematic efforts to undermine Germany's democratic constitutional order.

The designation had significant practical implications, allowing the BfV to deploy a wider range of surveillance tools against the party, including informants and expanded communications monitoring.

The AfD immediately challenged the designation in court. In February 2026, the Administrative Court in Cologne ruled that "the conditions for classifying and treating the applicant as a confirmed right-wing extremist endeavour are not met," effectively suspending the designation pending a full judicial review. The BfV paused its classification following the court ruling. The legal battle continued as of September 2026.

Separately, an attempt to initiate formal ban proceedings against the AfD — which under Germany's Basic Law requires a ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court — was launched in the Bundestag in January 2025 but failed to secure the necessary majority. A party ban under German law requires proof that the party "seeks to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order" — a high legal bar that has only been successfully cleared twice in German history, against the neo-Nazi SRP in 1952 and the Communist KPD in 1956.

Scandals and Foreign Entanglements

The AfD's record includes a series of significant scandals, several of which involve alleged connections to foreign authoritarian governments.

Russian and Chinese Links

In April 2024, Jian Guo — a parliamentary assistant to AfD MEP Maximilian Krah — was arrested on charges of spying for China's Ministry of State Security. Krah, the AfD's lead candidate for the 2024 European elections, was himself found to have received secret payments from both Russian and Chinese sources and faced German prosecution for alleged bribery, money laundering, and illegal financing. His statement that "not everyone in the SS was a criminal" was so inflammatory that it prompted the European Parliament's far-right Identity & Democracy group — itself no bastion of liberal values — to expel the AfD in May 2024.

Another AfD candidate, Petr Bystron, was alleged to have received €20,000 to spread pro-Russian propaganda through the Voice of Europe network, a Kremlin-linked disinformation platform.

Holocaust Relativization

Björn Höcke was convicted by a German court and fined €13,000 for using the Nazi stormtrooper slogan "Alles für Deutschland" ("Everything for Germany") at a public event — a phrase banned under German law. The Central Council of Jews in Germany has described the AfD as an "extremist party that embodies Nazi ideals," accusations the party denies.

The Potsdam Meeting

In November 2023, a meeting in Potsdam attended by AfD figures and wealthy businesspeople became public, at which detailed plans for mass deportations of immigrants — including German citizens with immigrant backgrounds — were reportedly discussed. The revelations triggered large-scale public demonstrations across Germany in early 2024, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets in protest. The AfD's vote share rose regardless.

International Alignment and the Global Right

The AfD does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of a wider international realignment of conservative and far-right politics, with significant backing from the American right under the Trump administration.

Elon Musk's endorsement of the AfD was extraordinary in its explicitness. In a December 2024 post on X, Musk declared "Only the AfD can save Germany." In January 2025, he hosted Alice Weidel for a live conversation on X, telling the audience: "You must vote for change" and "that is why I'm really strongly recommending that people vote for AfD." He later appeared by video at an AfD campaign rally. These interventions drew protests from the German government but were welcomed by the AfD, which used them to claim mainstream credibility and expand its reach to younger, online audiences.

JD Vance's appearance at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 — where he met privately with Weidel and publicly attacked the Brandmauer — marked the first time a senior American official had so directly intervened in German domestic politics to legitimize a far-right party. The Merz government responded with diplomatic displeasure, calling the meeting "unwelcome election interference."

The AfD is also connected to the broader European far-right network, though those connections have been strained by its extremism. After its expulsion from the Identity & Democracy group in 2024, the AfD joined the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, placing it alongside Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy and the Polish Law and Justice party, though tensions remain over the AfD's Holocaust revisionism.

What the AfD Means for German Democracy

The AfD's trajectory poses a series of genuine and difficult questions for German democratic institutions.

The Brandmauer strategy — denying the AfD governing power by refusing coalition — has thus far prevented it from exercising executive authority. But the strategy contains an inherent tension: if the AfD continues to grow, the arithmetic of coalition-building becomes increasingly strained. In Saxony-Anhalt, the remaining parties must form a multi-party coalition without the largest bloc in the legislature. At some point, this math breaks down entirely.

There is also the question of policy convergence. Critics argue that mainstream parties — particularly the CDU under Merz — have adopted increasingly restrictive immigration policies precisely to outbid the AfD on its core issue. The Merz government tightened border controls and reduced asylum processing in 2025. If mainstreaming the AfD's agenda makes it more legitimate while failing to suppress AfD vote share, the Brandmauer strategy may be self-defeating.

The party's deepest support base — eastern Germany, working-class communities, young men — reflects genuine grievances: relative economic deprivation, population decline, a sense of cultural dismissal from western-dominated political and media establishments. Addressing those grievances through policy rather than through legal or electoral firewalls is the challenge that has eluded Germany's mainstream parties for over a decade.

Chancellor Merz, whose approval ratings fell to historically unprecedented lows by mid-2026, faces an AfD that has overtaken his CDU in national polling for the first time. The September 2026 state elections — of which Saxony-Anhalt was the most dramatic — are expected to further weaken his coalition and raise new obstacles to his reform agenda.

Meanwhile, Germany's Federal Constitutional Court has not ruled definitively on the question of whether the AfD poses a sufficient threat to the constitutional order to be banned — a step that its proponents argue would be a necessary defense of democracy, and that its critics argue would create a martyr effect and radicalize the AfD's considerable support base.

Conclusion

The AfD began as a protest against a fiscal policy and became one of the most consequential political movements in postwar European history. In thirteen years, it traveled from the lecture halls of Hamburg economics departments to the brink of governing a German state — the first far-right party to do so since 1945. That journey was powered by a sequence of crises — the eurozone collapse, the migration surge, COVID-19, the energy crisis — each of which the AfD metabolized into electoral fuel.

The party's rise reflects forces that extend well beyond Germany: the fracturing of postwar liberal consensus, the mainstreaming of ethnonationalist rhetoric across the Western world, the disorientation of communities left behind by globalization, and the emergence of a new transnational right-wing alignment that runs from Moscow to Mar-a-Lago. Elon Musk's X posts and JD Vance's Munich handshake are not incidental details; they are signals of a shifting geopolitical order in which the AfD has found powerful patrons.

Whether Germany's democratic institutions can contain the AfD — through legal challenges, coalition firewalls, or the harder work of addressing the grievances that sustain it — remains the central political question of the Federal Republic's post-reunification history. The answer will determine not only the shape of German politics, but how far the model of postwar democratic reconstruction can stretch before it either bends or breaks.

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