The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) made significant gains in several state elections across Germany in September. In Saxony-Anhalt, the party won a frightening 44 percent of the vote and fell just three seats short of forming government. Two weeks later, it won 38 percent in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, doubling its vote share from the previous election. Even in liberal, multicultural Berlin, the AfD vote went from 9 percent to 16 percent.
The results have sent political shockwaves across not just across Germany but the whole of Europe. It is no wonder why. The AfD is on the extreme wing of the broader far-right surge worldwide. Founded in 2013 as a Eurosceptic opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bailouts of the Greek government, the party has moved radically to the right over the last decade.
Today, the AfD calls for mass deportations and a strict blood-based concept of German citizenship, while opposing the right to political asylum. It also campaigns for separate schools for the children of migrants. The party also argues that focusing on the crimes of the Nazi period encourages national humiliation and therefore opposes Holocaust memorials. In 2023, AfD leaders attended a secret meeting in Potsdam with wealthy donors and prominent neo-Nazis to develop a plan to expel from the country millions of migrants and refugees and hundreds of thousands of German citizens of non-German background.
The AfD is riddled with veteran neo-Nazis. While the party initially placed barriers on fascists joining, these have been loosened as the AfD has moved further right. Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD in the eastern state of Thuringia, has been a key figure driving this shift. Prior to his public rise with the AfD, Höcke wrote articles under the pseudonym “Landolf Ladig” for neo-Nazi publications, praising Hitler and the Nazi regime.
At campaign speeches, Höcke has repeatedly used the slogan “everything for Germany”, which was the official motto of the Nazi paramilitary wing (the Sturmabteilung, known as the Brownshirts or Storm Troopers). In an infamous 2017 speech in Dresden, Höcke sparked outrage by calling the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a “memorial of shame”. The AfD branches in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are closely associated with Höcke’s faction in the party.
A 2024 investigative report by Bavarian Radio found that AfD parliamentarians employ more than 100 individuals with ties to far-right extremist organisations. Numerous former activists and staff from the National Democratic Party—an openly neo-Nazi party since renamed The Homeland—are employed as strategy writers, social media managers and advisors. The AfD’s youth wing is effectively controlled by Nazis.
The AfD is so extreme that other European far-right leaders like France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Britain’s Nigel Farage have broken ties with the party, expelling it from their European Parliament coalition. However, the Trump administration and Elon Musk in the US and the Putin regime in Russia are all friendly with the AfD.
While the AfD has been gaining ground for some years, the latest results are a significant step forward and confirm that, despite the ebb in support for some figures like Trump, the fascist right has firmly entrenched itself as a permanent feature of contemporary capitalist politics across the globe.
That the AfD is so extreme only reinforces the seriousness of the situation. It also raises the question of why people in Germany, after the experiences of the Nazi period, would support such a filthy, bigoted party.
The primary driver behind the AfD’s rise has been the collapsing social base of the traditional parties in the German government. In a story repeated across the world, decades of support for neoliberal economics and centrist politics by the centre-right and centre-left have alienated millions of people from the establishment parties. The shift to the right in mainstream German politics in recent years has created plenty of kindling for the AfD fire to burn.
After all, it was not the AfD that invented the demonisation of Muslims and Arabs in Germany. Both the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) have stoked racism for years, promoting harsher border control regulations and punishing refugees and migrants in the process. A key turning point came when Angela Merkel surprisingly allowed more than 1 million Syrian refugees into Germany in 2015. In the aftermath of a racist backlash, the political establishment has mostly criticised the decision, legitimising the anti-refugee rhetoric of the AfD.
The centre-right CDU has bled the most support to the AfD, losing around a million voters to the far-right party in the last two election cycles. The AfD has skilfully won over the most rabidly racist right-wing voters who feel the CDU has been too moderate. However, as the AfD has grown, it has also broken away larger numbers of non-aligned voters and supporters of other parties such as the SPD.
In Saxony-Anhalt the AfD won a large proportion of working-class voters. Sixty-one percent of manual workers and labourers voted for the party, according to a post-election analysis by Democrata. It also found that 46 percent of office workers and 65 percent of voters who self-reported as poor or being in a negative financial situation voted for the AfD. While working-class support for the AfD is higher in eastern states such as Saxony-Anhalt, the party has also made inroads into traditional SPD-voting working-class suburbs in western Germany.
The SPD’s eroding social base has undoubtedly facilitated this growth in far-right support among working-class voters. This has been fuelled by the SPD’s embrace of “economic reforms” that punished workers and enriched German corporations. In particular, the SPD’s implementation of harsh labour laws and welfare cuts in the early 2000s fractured working-class loyalty.
In the face of this social demoralisation and the fraying of left-wing working-class loyalties, the AfD can get away with the lie that it is an anti-establishment force defending the interests of ordinary people against the elites.
This is not to say that the AfD is winning support on an economically populist basis. While the AfD has undoubtedly fed off the demoralisation produced by years of neoliberalism, it has pretty stock-standard, pro-free-market conservative economic positions not dissimilar to the Liberal Party in Australia. Much of the criticism of the establishment parties focuses on their supposed abandonment of good patriotic Germans for evil Islamic foreigners.
With the retreat of class politics and organisation in Germany—a pattern repeated elsewhere—it is not surprising that many people now support parties whose electoral appeal has little to do with their class interests. This also elevates the issues related to race, migration and law and order in the popular consciousness. Many working-class voters for the AfD either support or don’t seem to mind that the party supports classical free-market, anti-working-class policies.
Germany’s Mittelstand—small- and medium-sized businesses, family-owned businesses, independent tradespeople and self-employed professionals—also remains a large part of the AfD’s base. This is especially true in the eastern states, where middle-class support for the AfD often equals or exceeds working-class support. Many small business owners would classify themselves as financially struggling and attack the CDU for backing away from more extreme free-market policies.
While the AfD’s electoral breakthroughs have shocked much of the European political world, the responses are unlikely to stop its continued rise. The CDU and the SPD remain committed to corporate tax cuts, reduced social spending and other attacks on workers. They continue to chase the AfD to the right on anti-migrant racism. The CDU faces huge pressure to end its policy of refusing to work closely with the AfD.
The electoral victory of The Left party in the Berlin elections, and the recent history of anti-AfD protests involving tens of thousands, show there are opportunities to build a fightback. However, the proposals by The Left leaders for a united bloc of all non-AfD parties is a dead end. While this might block the AfD from forming government in the short term, it will likely just reinforce the AfD’s narrative that it is the only true anti-establishment opposition. If the German socialist left is going to defeat the AfD, it will have to take a radically different approach. But time is running out.
