Sunday’s election success didn’t come overnight for Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
It finished second with 20.8 per cent – doubling the size of its Bundestag parliamentary party to 152 seats – after a decade cultivating, and amplifying, public concerns over Germany’s extended political drift, its uncertain economic outlook and the consequences of its decade-old migration policy.
With populist claims, punctuated with regular, planned provocations, AfD politicians provide simple, skewed answers to the complexities of modern life – more than enough material to fill their alternative online channels, from TikTok to the nationalist web platform Deutschland Kurier.
On election day, the Kurier’s editor David Bendels told readers the “ruined left-liberal-woke establishment and sham conservative elites are shaking in their boots”. He concluded his election day editorial “with patriotic greetings”.
Britain to increase military spending as Kemi Badenoch and Keir Starmer compete to look toughest
‘I saw the Russian world from inside’: A Ukrainian human rights defender’s journey through war and captivity
Response to Elon Musk’s email shows possible limits to how far he can push US bureaucracy
The Russian over-50s fighting and dying in Ukraine
At this stage in its evolution, though, the AfD’s secret weapon is its self-radicalising multipliers.
Like the two men who met in the grey early hours of December 21st on a stuffy regional train bound for Magdeburg. Hours earlier, a black BMW crashed into the eastern German city’s main Christmas market, killing six and injuring hundreds more.
A day later at a rally near the crash site, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel denounced the main suspect as an “Islamist, full of hate”.
“Someone who loathes everything we stand for and what we love does not belong to us,” she said.
On the train, 12 hours before she spoke, the two middle-aged men – unusually for strangers on a train – were talking to each other in what sounded like a conversation but was more a game of rhetorical, far-right ping-pong.
After a few cautious test remarks they were soon swapping – with a mixture of delight and relief – AfD factoids and slogans in a nervous litany. When one drew breath, the other jumped in.
The world is off-kilter; Berlin’s “manky leftist” coalition is to blame for everything; climate change is nonsense for which we’re strangling our economy while China ...
The men’s faces and bodies appeared as tense as their rhetoric: one man’s right knee bounced nervously, the other’s index feet tapped the table before him.
For the duration of the two-hour train trip – perhaps around the clock – they remained in a state of permanent agitation, in particular when talk turned to Magdeburg: murderous Muslims; forced Islamification; Merkel the traitor of the people.
Curious to see their reaction, I showed them the latest news from the news wires on Magdeburg. The perpetrator was a German-based, Egyptian-born psychiatrist who, on his Twitter/X account, had warned about Islamists, denounced Merkel-backed immigration and praised the AfD as his favourite party.
The two men fell silent for a moment, looking at each other for guidance, but this plot twist in the Magdeburg attack doesn’t stick for long to their Teflon-coated reality.
“If you can believe that,” said one. The other added: “I only believe a third of what I read in the mainstream media, if that.”
They met just 90 minutes ago but these rhetorical freedom fighters for Germany’s future are brothers in arms – and valuable AfD allies.
In his recent study on the AfD’s decade-long rise, author Hendrik Cremer warned that “a point may come when the AfD are too big to stop”.
“The vehemence of the attack on liberal democracy and the rule of law derives in particular from how right-wing extremist content is disseminated not only by actors who move in a clearly defined right-wing extremist milieu,” he adds.
The AfD’s exponential growth, in other words, is down to foot soldiers such as the men on the Magdeburg train. They aren’t directly linked to the party but normalise its positions and push the boundaries of what can be said and done publicly.
Post-election analysis showed German men are more likely than women to vote for the AfD, with voters aged 25-44 its biggest backers. Those from lower and middle socioeconomic groups are more attracted to the party, the study showed, as well as those with basic and trades education. Support drops below average among university graduates.
Sunday’s election means, in real terms, that on average every fifth person you pass on a German street voted for the AfD – in eastern Germany every third person.
The spread is slow but steady, the voices now impossible to ignore.
Like my dish washer repair man who ranted about welfare for Syrians, or the cashier in my supermarket who hoped that so-called “remigration” of non-ethnic Germans will ease the housing crisis.
Just as AfD positions are entering mainstream discourse, mass protests and a flood of documentaries and books show that AfD awareness and pushback are gaining momentum, too.
Even German journalists, after a long and painful probation period, are upping their game in their AfD encounters.
Instead of emotional outbursts and leading questions, many simply confront party politicians with the fact-based reality outside their ideological bubble.
When Weidel insisted on Sunday evening that only her party represented the “will of the people”, a television host pointed out that 80 per cent of German voters didn’t back the AfD.
“That,” the host added drily, “is the will of the people.”
