Enxhi Seli-Zacharias is the improbable frontperson of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Gelsenkirchen, a working-class, industrial city in western Germany’s Ruhr Valley. The 30-year-old politician and political scientist arrived in Gelsenkirchen at the age of 6, together with her family, as refugees from newly post-communist Albania. Today, she sits in the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia.
She is the kind of cheerleader the AfD will likely need to achieve its stated goal of passing the Christian Democrats as Germany’s most popular party and eventually coming to power. Seli-Zacharias is a first-generation immigrant who is explicitly aiming to rally support for the bombastically anti-migration, xenophobic party among Germany’s immigrant communities. It’s a voting bloc that AfD leaders believe has massive potential for their project.
Seli-Zacharias’s TikTok and YouTube clips—which regularly get six-digit likes—speak straight to an unlikely voter pool: the 8 million registered voters in Germany with a migration background, 14 percent of the total electorate, and growing. Nearly a third of the country’s population—24 million—has roots in recent migration, and that number climbs ever higher as immigration outpaces the negative native-German birthrate. Germany has to crack down hard on “illegal immigration,” Seli-Zacharias inveighs in dire tones, targeting migrants from Africa and the Middle East who she alleges regularly rob and rape upstanding Germans like herself and the many other good people in Germany who speak proper German, work hard, raise families, and respect the law.
Seli-Zacharias counts herself among the latter demographic as a heterosexual, law-abiding citizen who speaks perfect German. In the North Rhine-Westphalia parliament, Seli-Zacharias believes she represents other integrated immigrants when she blasts the “chaos” and “failure” of Germany’s recent refugee policies. Migration has become the No. 1 topic for German voters overall, according to polls. Studies have shown that it’s also the foremost concern of non-native German voters. At the height of last decade’s refugee crisis, one study showed that 40 percent of Germans with an immigrant background said they thought the country should take in fewer refugees, with a quarter saying it should stop all refugees from entering entirely. “This dissatisfaction [with immigration policies] is apparently greater among some of the people with foreign roots living here than is their fear of the AfD,” the weekly magazine Focus recently concluded.
These are the sentiments that Seli-Zacharias feeds. Germany’s Willkommenskultur (culture of hospitality) ”has reached its limit,“ she intones in her videos, most probably referring to the 350,000 foreign nationals who applied for political asylum in Germany in 2023. “No federal state should have to spend 640 million euros for people who don’t belong here in the first place,” she says, referring to North Rhine-Westphalia’s 2023 state budget for all aspects of immigration.
Germany’s political class is not entirely unaware of the phenomenon of people with immigrant backgrounds voting for anti-immigrant parties, although previously in drips and drabs. In a regional election in the federal state of Hesse in 2018, more naturalized immigrants voted for the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and even the Greens than the AfD. But 14 percent of those with migration background did vote AfD, which is slightly higher than the share of Germany-born Germans (13 percent) who cast their ballots for the far right party. Experts like Sanem Kleff, director of a Berlin-based anti-racism NGO, argue that the AfD’s outreach to immigrants—in particular those hailing from Turkey and eastern Europe—has just begun and could pay off bigtime for the party.
Experts say there are several reasons for the affinity that some immigrant voters feel for this anti-immigrant party. One reason is their overlap on illiberal social views. “Just because a person moves from point A to point B doesn’t mean they leave their political socializations behind,” says Kleff, who was born in Turkey and raised in northern Germany. “Many come from deeply patriarchal cultures and are very conservative and nationalistic. In Turkish elections, the Turkish population in Germany overwhelmingly votes hard-right conservative,” Kleff told Foreign Policy.
Research on the political views of Germany’s diverse migrant communities is spotty, but the existing data supports Kleff’s claim. A 2016 University of Applied Sciences HMKW study found that although many newcomers expressed a desire to learn the German language and fit in, “there are clear differences between the refugees and the German majority society, namely in illiberal attitudes toward (homo)sexuality, marriage and partnerships, and even towards living arrangements such as shared flats. A worrying number of refugees agree with right-wing populist, authoritarian statements,” concluded the report. The report found that the values of many refugees “in key political areas are most similar to those of AfD supporters or the [right populist] Pegida movements.” Many voters with migration background also came to the AfD through the anti-vax movement, which perpetuated an array of conspiracy theories. The far right—in Germany and across Europe—has woven many of them into its ranks, experts say.
But the immigrant voters who support the AfD may have material motivations as well. Many immigrants fit the socioeconomic profile of the white German AfD voter. It’s not just that LGBTQ issues, feminism, and climate protection tend to be anathema to them. They are middle or lower-middle class people who are worried about losing what material security they have. They are alarmed about the confluence of crises that beset the German economy and see the future bleakly. They want to pay less taxes and desire job security. Newcomers are competition for them in the low-wage job market and in Germany’s increasingly strained housing market.
The “us versus them” mentality among older immigrant groups in Germany may also be fueled by a divergence in their respective paths to Germany and resentment at the perceived advantages enjoyed by the new arrivals. The German government has introduced various policies in recent years to help integrate refugees, including welfare payments, free language courses, and special university enrollment programs. Many of the 3 million people of Turkish descent living in Germany, meanwhile, recall having to struggle to keep their heads above water in their new home country. After arriving as “guest workers” in the 1960s or 1970s, they and their descendants received relatively little support from the German government —only to be later blamed by Germans for an alleged failure to integrate.
But voters with immigrant background tend not to acknowledge that the AfD may pose a material threat to them as well—even to their very presence in Germany. The AfD has long referred to the non-ethnic German citizens as “passport Germans,” that is, foreigners (wrongfully) possessing German passports. Moreover, the AfD’s Islamophobia and folkish German racism are defining characteristics of a hard-right party even more radical that many of its European peers. Some AfD leaders speak openly about plans to “re-migrate” up to 25 million foreigners, including those holding German passports, like Seli-Zacharias.
But Seli-Zacharias and like-minded AfD stalwarts turn a blind eye to these sorts of extremism. It is only fresh waves of migration that Seli-Zacharias wants to stop and “criminal foreigners” that she wants to expel. Seli-Zacharias underscores that she is thankful and respectful of the generosity Germany has shown her and her family.
“Perhaps subconsciously, they think that if they act like native Germans they won’t get thrown out themselves,” Naika Foroutan, director of the German Center for Integration and Migration Research, explained to German media. “They want to believe that the AfD doesn’t see them as the problem—you belong to us, they hear—but the others, they are the problem,” Foroutan said.
“The AfD has been very clever in the way it reaches out to immigrants, particularly the Russian Germans and those with Turkish background,” Kleff says. Since the 1980s, 2.3 million ethnic Germans have emigrated to Germany from Russia. The AfD has been the only German party to address them, and they did it first with Russia-language campaign materials, Kneff says, noting that many of the Russian Germans couldn’t speak German upon their arrival.
German voters with Turkish roots are the second immigrant bloc that AfD pragmatists have in their sights: It is a potentially growing group, due to a recently passed dual-citizenship law that could allow more people of Turkish descent to become German voters. Attracting these voters is a goal that the entire party has not yet officially endorsed. On the contrary, party fundamentalists insist that the AfD and Germany as such must be ethnically homogenous—namely white, German, and Christian. But by emphasizing an aversion to “Arabs” and not the larger category of “Muslims,” which would include most Turkish-background people, the AfD separates the two voter groups from each other and opens up a door for the latter.
Kleff notes that in Turkey itself, there is enormous animosity toward the 3.6 million Syrian refugees who live there, who are referred to by many Turks simply as “Arabs.” Low-income, work-a-day Turks fear that the refugees, who work for lower wages, could take their jobs from them—leaving them with nothing. The same goes for those in Germany.
Once the AfD gets its pitch down, Kleff says that more immigrants will go its way. Germany’s democratic parties look as incapable as ever of talking to the country’s integrated immigrants as a constituency that deserves to be taken seriously.