Across Germany, as many as 1 million people streamed into streets and city squares last week to protest the surging popularity and ever crasser messaging of the extreme right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD). In Berlin alone, under the banner “Defend democracy: Together against the right,” more than 100,000 people crammed onto the Bundestag lawn on the evening of Jan. 21, flowing over into the adjacent streets between Brandenburg Gate and the city’s central train station. The signs and speeches everywhere from the Baltic Sea port of Rostock to the city of Freiburg near the Swiss border hit a similar note: The AfD’s stripe of right-wing radicalism is out of place in democratic Germany.
This may have once been an exaggeration, but it no longer is. Founded in 2013, the AfD isn’t brand new, nor is its provocative, thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. But over the course of the past five years—and in the face of damning revelations last week about a secret meeting that took place in November—it has radicalized dramatically. The AfD is now more extreme than many fellow far-right parties across Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, among others.
Germany’s foremost expert on the subject, sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, said the AfD now stands for an “authoritarian national radicalism,” namely, an ideology that propagates a hierarchically ordered, ethnically homogeneous society overseen by a strong-arm state. What’s particularly radical, he said, is the party’s communication with and mobilization of misanthropic groups that rain violence on select minorities. These protagonists encompass a wide array of hate groups, including neo-Nazis, which are largely responsible for the highest level of hate crimes in Germany in three decades. Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.
Research published in the weekly Der Spiegel shows that the AfD, a party started by nationally minded economists who advocated a return to the Deutsche mark as the national currency, now uses language nearly identical to that of the defunct National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a small, virulently xenophobic, and openly neo-Nazi party that ran in German elections for decades but never managed to win seats in the Bundestag. “The AfD and NPD are very close. Not just in terms of their audience or some of their personalities,” Spiegel claimed. “They have major ideological overlaps. The AfD measures up to the NPD [of 2012] in almost all areas, even if the AfD appears more moderate in its party program.”
Terms used by AfD politicians in countless speeches today were part of the NPD’s lingua franca for years, according to Spiegel. Documents attributed to both parties employ reactionary terminology, some of it straight from Nazi Germany, such as Umvolkung (population replacement) and Volkstod (death of the German nation), as well as Stimmvieh (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties and Passdeutschen (foreign nationals holding German passports). And like the NPD, Spiegel reported in another study, the AfD maintains close links with violent militants.
And this radicalism, which in the past had turned Germans off, has now lifted the AfD to new heights: It is polling at 22 percent support nationwide, second only to the Christian Democrats, and well over 30 percent in several states, making it the number one political force there in advance of autumn elections.
The bastions of this radicalism can be found in the party’s youth organization, Junge Alternative and three federal states, all of them in eastern Germany: Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia. They are deemed the “extreme right” by Germany’s top domestic security agency and are now under observation as a threat to the democratic order. The investigation could land the case before the country’s highest court, which could ban the party outright.
The current outburst of popular indignation at the AfD, echoed by all of the other major political parties, comes on the heels of an investigative exposé that found that at a clandestine meeting in November, ranking AfD personalities met with known neo-Nazis and wealthy financiers to hammer out plans for the forced deportation of foreign nationals and even foreign-born German citizens.
The extremists congregated at a hotel near Potsdam to design what they called a “remigration master plan” to forcibly repatriate millions of people. Shocked observers drew parallels to the 1942 Wannsee Conference, held not far from Potsdam, at which the Nazis coordinated their plan to deport and murder the entire Jewish population of Europe.
While some AfD politicos have tried to distance the party from the Potsdam meeting, others endorsed its purpose. “Remigration is not a secret plan, but a promise. … and there’s no better way to put it,” announced Hans-Christoph Berndt, the AfD point person in the Brandenburg state parliament, on Jan. 17.
Though the exposé had the force of a bombshell, these revelations don’t throw a new light on the AfD. Rather, they confirm the diagnosis of many experts that the AfD, under the leadership of its most extreme figures—particularly Björn Höcke, a member of the Thuringia legislature—has outpaced other European far-right parties in its radicalism. “The current AfD wouldn’t find a place in the ranks of the Sweden Democrats and most of the other more moderate far-right parties among the European Conservatives and Reformists faction in the European Parliament,” said Ann-Cathrine Jungar, a political scientist at Sodertorn University in Sweden.
She explained that like the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party (formerly the True Finns), and the Danish People’s Party are opposed to immigration and favor law-and-order states. But the Nordic rightists’ experiences in office pushed them to adapt to mainstream norms and policy options. (The Sweden Democrats are currently an informal supporter of the Swedish ruling coalition; the Finns are a coalition member in Finland; and the DPP acted as a support party to a conservative Danish government between 2001 and 2011, as well as from 2015 to 2019.)
The radicalized AfD, Jungar said, in contrast to these parties, actively courts militants, trades in antisemitic tropes, and toys with the proposition of Germany exiting NATO and the European Union. Moreover, AfD politicians have stood against adoption rights for same-sex couples, the inclusion of disabled kids in schools, and the legality of abortion. “These positions simply wouldn’t stand a chance in Sweden,” Jungar added.
The case of the AfD’s close ally, Austria’s Freedom Party (FPO), is more complicated, not least because it has been undergoing a fresh phase of radicalization. But even so, the Austrian historian Ulf Brunnbauer of University of Regensburg said that two stints in the federal government since 2000 and tenures in many regional legislatures have pushed the FPO to tone down its more racist positions.
“The FPO is less extremist than the AfD, especially if you take the idea of racial purity as yardstick,” Brunnbauer said, citing the former party’s wooing of naturalized Serbs. “The FPO includes a larger breadth of opinions, whereas the AfD has lost most of its more moderate proponents. With some exceptions, such as the current party head, Herbert Kickl, many FPO people are much more moderate.” Moreover, Brunnbauer noted, there is no comparative neo-Nazi presence and mobilization in Austria like that in eastern Germany.
Benjamin Opratko, a political scientist at Germany’s Leuphana University of Lüneburg, however, is of another opinion—not about the AfD, but about the FPO: “The FPO under Kickl has moved further to the right. It is now indistinguishable from the right-wingers in the AfD,” he argued. “They want people who they think don’t belong here out of Austria. They don’t want to gas them yet, but they want to strip people of their citizenship. They want to cut people’s social benefits to such an extent that their livelihoods are destroyed. That is essentially the program of parties like the AfD and the FPO. They harbor fantasies ranging from populist to fascist.”
Opratko said that neither the AfD nor any of its far-right peers in Western Europe are close to taking full power the way that Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party has in Hungary, or how the Law and Justice party did in Poland.
“By stacking the courts and clamping down on opposition forces, these parties gradually undermined the democratic order,” Opratko said. “This is the AfD’s model. It’s what they want to do.”