Germany's far right soars, achieving best results since World War II

BerlinThe Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right, Eurosceptic and anti-immigration party, has been able to take advantage of popular discontent with the "traffic light coalition" of the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz. In the early federal elections on Sunday, it did well in the polls and placed itself as the second force in the Bundestag, the lower house of the German Parliament. The far-right candidate Alice Weidel, who leads the party with Tino Chrupalla, has managed to The best result for the German far right

According to projections by public broadcaster ARD, AfD would win 19.5% of the vote, twice as many as in the 2021 election, when it won 10.34% of the vote. The Alternative for Germany would thus go from having 83 deputies to 142, pending the final results. Twelve years after its founding, Alternative for Germany has managed to oust the Social Democrats and the Greens, who, together with the liberals (FDP), had governed Germany for the past three years with Olaf Scholz as chancellor.

However, if there are no surprises or plot twists, AfD will not be able to enter the next coalition government – although Weidel has already offered to do so – since the conservative Friedrich Merz, leader of the The Christian Democratic alliance CDU-CSU has rejected any future collaboration with the ultras..

The party, founded in April 2013 by Hamburg University economics professor Bernd Lucke and lawyer Alexander Gauland, had an economically liberal, populist, Eurosceptic and conservative profile in its early years. The choice of the party name was influenced by the fact that Chancellor Angela Merkel said during the financial and euro crisis that there was no alternative. "If the euro fails, Europe will fail," Merkel said. AfD rejected Merkel's government policy to save the euro and advocated an end to multi-million euro financial bailouts, a return to the German mark and the dissolution of the eurozone.

Radicalisation on the migration issue

The party was then divided into two wings: the economic liberals led by Lucke and the ultra-conservatives of Frauke Petry. The party gradually became more radical, moving from its initial Euroscepticism to an anti-immigration discourse of a xenophobic and anti-Islamist nature.

The AfD contested its first federal elections in September 2013. With 4.7% of the vote, the far-right narrowly missed out on entering the Bundestag, failing to surpass the 5% threshold required to obtain representation. The 2015 European migration crisis and the decision of the then conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel to open her doors to 1.2 million refugees and asylum seekers, most of them Syrian, was "a gift" to the AfD, as its leaders have acknowledged.

The far-right party won 94 seats in the 2017 federal election, becoming the first far-right party to win parliamentary representation in the Bundestag since 1945, and the third largest party in terms of seats. In the 2021 election, the AfD won 10.34% of the vote, which was a slight drop, dropping it to fifth place in terms of seats. But in the 2024 European elections, Alternative for Germany was, with 15.9% of the vote, the second-largest party in Germany, after the conservative CDU-CSU alliance.

Support from the United States

In this election campaign, the AfD has promised to withdraw Germany from the European Union and the euro, close borders and carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and foreign criminals. Weidel has exploited recent knife attacks and mass carjackings by migrants and asylum seekers from Muslim countries for electoral gain. "For the AfD, bad news is good news and good news is reinterpreted as bad news," explains former party member Franziska Schreiber in her book Inside AfD [Inside AfD], published in 2018.

Weidel – who claims that his party is not far-right, but rather conservative liberal and that Hitler was a "communist" and a "socialist"– has had the invaluable support of the technology magnate Elon Musk, owner of Telsa, SpaceX and the social network X, in this election campaign. Musk believes that “only AfD can save Germany”.

The far-right leader, a favourite of the Trumpists, also met during the election campaign with the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the US Vice President, JD Vance. The number two in the US government created controversy in Germany by urging, from Munich, to break the cordon sanitaire around far-right parties. Although the outgoing Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and other candidates rejected any outside interference in the German elections, it was already too late.