The problem of the Alternative for Germany Party

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In the heart of what was once communist East Germany, a far-right group that for some has evoked the country’s Nazi past may be on the verge of becoming the strongest party for the first time in a state election.

As the country’s central governing coalition led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz grapples with Russia’s war with Ukraine, slow economic growth, the transition to green energy and a renewed debate about migration sparked by a recent terror attack, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, an anti-immigration, nationalist party which denies human-caused climate change, is looking to take advantage at a local level.

In the east German states of Saxony and Thuringia, home to around 4.1 million and 2.1 million people respectively, the party, which is under monitoring by the country’s domestic intelligence agency for suspected extremism, is ahead in several polls and expected to win about 30% of Sunday’s vote.

With other smaller populist parties like the left-wing Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) or Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance are also expected to make gains, so the prospects look grim for Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats, the environmentalist Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats, who make up Germany’s federal government, although the former two parties are the junior partners in both outgoing regional governments. The mainstream opposition Christian Democratic Union also could also lose seats.

People were picking populists to express their disappointment with the governing parties, Sudha David-Wilp, regional director of the German Marshall Fund’s Berlin office, told NBC News on Thursday. “They’re not happy about Berlin’s support of Ukraine. They’re also unhappy about the economic transformation that’s taking place,” she said.

She added that it was “more difficult to form viable coalitions.” The traditional German model of two major parties and a smaller kingmaker party is over, she said, adding that many governing coalitions including the current one led by Scholz now consist of three parties.

But she said it was “hard then when it comes to writing a coalition agreement and coming to a consensus on things, because each party is also trying to, of course, maintain its identity and also cater to its base.”

Set up in April 2013 as a movement against the euro currency, the AfD shifted its focus to Islam and immigration and has grown in popularity at both local and national levels ever since, particularly in the former East Germany, the former communist half of the country which had strong ties to the then-Soviet Union; polling has shown there is more skepticism about NATO and Germany’s support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.

In June’s European Parliament elections, the party finished second in Germany, despite a series of scandals engulfing the party in the lead-up to the vote.

The party’s top candidate Maximilian Krah was forced to withdraw from campaigning in May after telling an Italian newspaper that the SS, the Nazis’ main paramilitary force, were “not all criminals.”

One of his aides was also charged with spying for China and another candidate faced allegations of receiving bribes from a pro-Russian news portal.

But the party nonetheless gained ground, particularly among younger voters.

“The No. 1 issue is, of course, the migration topic,” David-Wilp said.

More than 1 million people benefited from then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s doors to asylum-seekers in 2015, making the country by far the largest European destination for refugees. But the issue of integration is a thorny one and the AfD harnessed hostility toward foreigners as it rose from the fringes.

Immigration became an even hotter issue after three people were killed and eight wounded in a knife attack in the city of Solingen last week, for which the Islamic State terrorist group claimed responsibility.

Björn Höcke, the party’s leader in Thuringia, posted on his Facebook page that “the “multicultural experiment” that has been forced upon the Germans must be stopped.” It is accompanied by the illustration of a bloody knife through the words diversity and Solingen.

Höcke was fined twice this year by German courts for using the Nazi-era slogan “Everything for Germany” at two AfD events in recent years. He has appealed the rulings.

In an apparent bid to prevent his rivals from seizing the initiative on the issue, Scholz appeared to swing rightward at a campaign event Tuesday in the Thuringian city of Jena.

“Those who commit serious crimes should also be deported to countries like Afghanistan and Syria,” he said. Anyone who does such things and who brings violence and aggression into our society has forfeited the right to protection in this country and must accept that we will use all means and levers to bring them back.”

On Friday, the German government announced that 28 Afghan nationals with criminal convictions had been flown to Afghanistan. It was the first such flight since the Taliban retook power there three years ago.

Scholz’s comments were not greeted warmly by everyone however.

Anna-Lena Metz, a pro-democracy activist in Thuringia, said Thursday that she did not believe centrist parties would be well served if they take over the narrative from right-wing parties.

“Deportations are never a solution, and we will not be able to deport the danger potential. We need a much stronger focus on social policy that includes everyone,” she said.

Metz, a spokesperson for the anti-right-wing activist group Auf die Plätze Bündnis Erfurt, was one of the organizers of an anti-right-wing demonstration Sunday in Thuringia’s state capital, Erfurt, that was attended by thousands of people.

It was similar to rallies attended by hundreds of thousands of people in cities across Germany earlier this year, after reports from the investigative news website Correctiv about a meeting of right-wing extremists, including AfD party members, in the city of Potsdam, where the deportation of people of foreign origin was discussed.

While those rallies and Sunday’s passed off peacefully, at a campaign rally in Thuringia on Thursday, a man sprayed pink at BSW’s leader Sahra Wagenknecht.

Were the AfD to win, it would be a potent signal for the party ahead of next year’s national election. But it is unclear whether any other party would be prepared to form a coalition with it to put it in power.

She has two children with a Sri Lankan-born woman, speaks Chinese and previously worked at global financial institutions — an unconventional profile for the leader of a male-dominated far-right party that venerates traditional family values, fosters deep anti-immigrant sentiments and promotes populist economic policies.

But in recent elections, Alice Weidel took the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party from the fringes to the heart of power. Championed by Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance, Weidel is part of a growing group of powerful women leading Europe’s ascendant far-right parties, alongside Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen.

With party co-chair Tino Chrupalla, Weidel led the AfD to second place in Germany’s election last month, a triumph for a party being monitored by the country’s domestic intelligence agency for suspected extremism.

“Nobody has done this in Europe in such a short time,” a beaming Weidel said at a news conference after her party secured just over 20% of the vote, doubling its share from 2021. Noting that she had missed several calls from Musk that morning, she added that her party “especially want a very good, a very good relationship with the Trump administration, who are doing an excellent job.”

Weidel, who has previously praised the importance of children being raised in a traditional, nuclear family and has said that legalizing same-sex marriage is unimportant, nonetheless raises her two sons with her Sri Lankan-born female partner of 20 years, Sarah Bossard, in Willerzell, a sleepy village in the heart of Switzerland with around 1,000 residents. (Officially, she is registered as a resident of Überlingen, in Germany, just over the border from Switzerland.)

The AfD has opposed gay marriage and the expansion of laws allowing same-sex couples to adopt, but Weidel has said her sexuality does not conflict with the AfD’s traditional values, and analysts say the party’s rank and file are prepared to overlook her family life as long as she brings them success.

Before entering politics, Weidel was a consultant for Goldman Sachs and Allianz Global Investors, a slice of her background that appeals to those in the AfD who seek to appear both more moderate than its most anti-immigrant flank and more practical, though she has championed the AfD’s populist economic platform of big tax cuts and steep increases in public spending.

“She has an appeal to the economic conservatives within the AfD, and this gives her some credibility outside the party or at least the more moderate wing of the AfD fellowship,” Markus Ziener, a senior visiting fellow with the nonpartisan German Marshall Fund think tank, told NBC News.

‘A tough person’
Raised in a middle-class family in the northwestern German town of Harsewinkel, Weidel’s father was a salesman and her mother was a homemaker. The youngest of three, she told the Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche that she got into trouble at school for being too argumentative. Although her parents did not belong to any party, she described her upbringing as “highly political,” without mentioning whether they were on the left or right.

But in November, the German broadsheet Welt reported that her grandfather Hans Weidel was made chief judge of the brutal Warsaw military court in 1944 in a document signed personally by Adolf Hitler. Weidel said she did not know her grandfather, who died when she was 6, and he was not “a topic of conversation in the family.”

She joined the AfD shortly after it was founded in 2013 as a movement against the European Union and the euro currency, both of which she has criticized sharply.

After then-Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors to more than 1 million refugees in 2015, the AfD, whose leadership by that time Weidel had joined, turned its attention to stronger borders and restrictive migration policies.

The party was able to harness simmering hostilities against both Muslims and foreigners, as well as anti-E.U. sentiment, building a stronghold in the regions that once made up East Germany, where skepticism toward NATO and the country’s support for Ukraine in its war against Russia remains high.

“If you go to east Germany, people will tell you they vote for the AfD no matter what because it’s an anti-establishment thing, an anti-migration thing and a feeling like east Germans need a stronger voice,” Zeiner said.

As AfD has risen, it has had to try to bat away allegations of extremism, including from Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, which has the party’s branches in both Saxony and Thuringia under official surveillance as “proven right-wing extremist” groups.

Among statements that have raised alarm was one by Alexander Gauland, the party’s co-founder and a current member of parliament, who previously dismissed Hitler’s dictatorship as a “speck of bird poop” in Germany’s history.

A powerful party leader in the east, Björn Höcke, was fined twice last year by German courts for using the Nazi-era slogan “Everything for Germany” at AfD events, and had argued that he was not aware that Nazi storm troopers had used the phrase, according to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. He has also suggested it’s time for the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. He is appealing the rulings.

And before June’s European Parliament elections, the party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, was forced to withdraw from campaigning after telling an Italian newspaper that the SS, the Nazis’ main paramilitary force, were “not all criminals.”

The AfD has repeatedly rejected the accusations of extremism.

Weidel herself disputed the idea that the AfD shared any affinity with the country’s Nazi past in an interview with Musk on his X platform last month, suggesting her party’s libertarian views contrasted with those of Hitler, who she said had nationalized Germany’s economy.

“He wasn’t a conservative. He wasn’t a libertarian. He was a communist socialist guy,” she said of the former Nazi leader, who is better known for exterminating people he considered outsiders, rather than his economic policies.

The statement also employed a common far-right misrepresentation of Hitler, who in fact privatized much of the government, outlawed labor unions and ordered the killing of hundreds of thousands of people presumed to be socialists and communists.

Comparing Weidel to her self-declared hero, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, professor Werner J. Patzelt, the research director at the right-leaning Belgium-based think tank MCC Brussels, said in a telephone interview last week that she had “imposed discipline” on the party.

“She is a tough person,” he said, adding that she had “started as a critic of the right wingers within the party, but then she made her peace with them and was able to integrate them.”

If the AfD can avoid mistakes in the short term, “then her future depends on whether other parties can form a government,” Patzelt said, adding that the AfD rank and file would “tolerate her as long as she brings success to the party.”

“Sometimes, people are not the same as the rest of the party,” he added. “They come as surprises.”

As with the rise of the far right in Austria, France, Italy Hungary, Poland and of course Ukraine, I am more interested in why they became poplar > the parties themselves

Who are these people?, why are they supporting this party?. When Nazism was on the rise in Germany, all the attention was on the party, not the German people who put them in power.

But a lot of people are still rather uneducated and don't have the critical thinking skills necessary to understand how selfish and ultimately unworkable their ideals are, or to see through the lies that populist politicians tell.

I suspect that this is not always the case. In the US, the democrats caricatured MAGA as a movement of hillbillies and hicks. But as with the Nazi party in the 1920s and 30s. a significant proportion of supporters are intelligent and worldly and sophisticated.

Oh yes, there are also brighter people who know what they're doing. And people can be rather selective with their capacity to think diligently. I heard that the idiots who killed themselves at Waco were often well-educated and had good jobs that they couldn't have had if they'd been globally stupid.

Oh yes, there are also brighter people who know what they're doing. And people can be rather selective with their capacity to think diligently. I heard that the idiots who killed themselves at Waco were often well-educated and had good jobs that they couldn't have had if they'd been globally stupid.

That this was going to happen was well warned but was ignored because many of the the same people warning us had wrongly predicted Trump’s first term would turn America Nazi.

That this was going to happen was well warned but was ignored because many of the the same people warning us had wrongly predicted Trump’s first term would turn America Nazi.

As with the rise of the far right in Austria, France, Italy Hungary, Poland and of course Ukraine, I am more interested in why they became poplar > the parties themselves

Who are these people?, why are they supporting this party?. When Nazism was on the rise in Germany, all the attention was on the party, not the German people who put them in power.