The Rise of Alternative für Deutschland

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the conservative right-wing party in Germany which first stood for election in the national Bundestag elections in September 2013, has been a staple of German politics ever since. Following their founding in February 2013, the party has been maligned and stigmatised as ‘radical right-wing’, ‘Islamophobic’, ‘anti-Western’ and with ‘strong ties to Russia’. Yet the AfD has grown steadily, making clear its positions for a stronger Germany while maintaining traditional values. 

After decades of policies where right-wing voices were supposedly safeguarded by parties like the CDU/CSU (Christian Democrats) and the FDP (Liberal Democrats), not only the left-wing parties but also these parties have started to become nervous of being exposed. Very soon, all parties created a cordon sanitaire around the AfD in the hope that the population would not want to identify with it. This was partly successful in the beginning, but slowly people began to realise that it is very strange that CDU/CSU and FDP do not want to cooperate with the AfD, whereas their right-wing ideas where Germany should go seem to be very closely aligned. People started to see that despite rhetoric on closed borders, tax cuts, protecting or even promoting growth of the economy, preserving energy and gas, the people in government coalitions were doing exactly the opposite. The proof of this betrayal was provided by the FDP. The FDP joined forces with the far-left Greens and the social democratic SPD in December 2021 – an apparent example of political suicide. From the very beginning, fights broke out between these two left-wing parties and the FDP. This eventually resulted in the resignation of the Finance Minister and FDP party leader, Christian Lindner last year. Since then, the FDP has been below the 5% electoral threshold in the polls and the party's future looks bleak.

That every effort is being made to ‘keep the AfD small’ was evident in January and February 2024 when large protests ‘against the radical right’ were organised, with even Chancellor Olaf Scholz leading one of them. These demonstrations were in response to a publication by the ‘research platform’ Correctiv which reported that the AfD had spoken to an Austrian extremist about mass deportations of millions of foreigners if the party came to power. It soon emerged that not only was this total nonsense, but thanks to real journalists, it became clear that it was yet another attempt by the Scholz government to put the AfD in a bad light. Taxpayers' money was allegedly used to stage the protests. They allegedly used taxpayers’ money to stage the protests and tricked around 300,000 naive demonstrators to participate. According to some sources, they even paid these protesters. Footage has surfaced where people, on arriving at the protest site, were shocked by the real purpose of this demonstration, then turned around and went home. But the anti-AfD demonstrations quickly neutralised the genuine anti-government farmers’ protests as a side effect. 

The AfD is looking beyond the delusions of the day and is fully concentrating on perhaps the most important Bundestag elections since World War II, after the failure of the worst government Germany has had in 80 years, according to public opinion in Germany and abroad. Alice Weidel was still modest about the AfD's chances in November but developments are following each other at a furious pace. The reality might be entirely different in a few months. With even foreign leaders getting involved in Germany, the focus is starting to move more and more towards the AfD. First, Elon Musk reported on his own platform X with the clear post: ‘Germany can only be saved with Alice Weidel as Chancellor.’ The whole establishment was turned upside down. Things got even worse for them when Weidel was the only Member of Parliament invited to Donald Trump's inauguration on 20 January. The European Commission has announced censoring ‘disinformation’ as its biggest goal for 2025, and posts like Musk's could then be a reason for them to censor or even ban X. 

Even Putin has now interfered in the upcoming German elections by announcing that as far as he is concerned, all old gas supply contracts from early 2022 can be reactivated immediately if Weidel becomes Chancellor. So back to the cheap energy which everyone craves! With this, Putin is clearly showing that the sky-high energy costs suffered by Germans could come down very quickly if Germans will make a wise choice in February. In doing so, he is also showing that the narrative proclaimed in recent years, that unaffordable energy was solely Putin's fault, could very quickly have taken a different turn if instead of opting for ever further sanctions on Russia, they entered into talks as equal partners. 

The genie is out of the bottle. Increasingly, people are realising they have been lied to.  People in Eastern Germany in particular are leading the way in waking up the rest of the country to the realisation that the current course of Germany is hazardous.

With rising AfD polls and increasing nervousness among the other parties, it is inevitable that mistakes will be made in the panic. For instance, Friedrich Merz of the CDU recently said he considers it possible that Robert Habeck (the Greens) could once again be given the role of Minister of Economic Affairs in a cabinet with him as Chancellor. Appointing the architect of the country's near collapse to this post once more would almost certainly be the economic death blow for Germany. Markus Söder, prime minister of Bavaria and chairman of the CSU was vocal about the fact that he would never accept this, after which Merz immediately backed down. In doing so, he clearly showed that his personal ambitions have nothing to do with saving the country.

With a grasp of the party programme, one would think that citizens would be left with virtually no arguments not to vote AfD:

-End wars and their funding; no US missiles on German soil. 

-Cheap energy from Russia; stop the ‘green transition’.

-Drastic tax cuts for citizens and companies so that citizens can make ends meet on their salaries and companies can invest again.

-Return illegal immigrants and those who profit structurally from benefits, and do not want to contribute to the economy, to their country of origin.

-Spend the tens of billions of euros that disappear abroad each year, often for nonsensical ‘projects’, in their own country and on their own population. The transfer half a billion Euros to Peru for the construction of bicycle paths, when only the elite there can afford a bicycle, is over as far as the AfD is concerned. 

It is now becoming visible that the other parties are secretly adopting AfD positions in the hope no one notices their 180-degree turn. Where citizens had to deal with higher and higher taxes, the SPD now suddenly wants tax cuts. They also now suddenly want to help businesses with billions of euros in subsidies. Whether citizens believe this is highly questionable. 

A very important point where the AfD stands head and shoulders above the rest is the fact that all parliamentarians have completed one or more university studies. The Greens in particular have huge gaps here.

It is not only the AfD that goes full steam ahead. Elsewhere in Europe countries are also making big turns to the right. Romanian independent politician Calin Georgescu, for instance, was seen as hopeless in the presidential elections in December, but he won as much as 23% of the vote and could undoubtedly have won in the second round. The establishment was quick to blame ‘interference’ from Russia. Under pressure from the EU, the second round was cancelled and the court declared the result of the first as invalid. In the polls, Georgescu has now risen to 40 percent and this shows that not everything is fixable. 

In Georgia, too, the right-wing and now sworn-in new president Micheil Kavelashvili is a thorn in the EU's side, but the staged mock protests, while long-lasting, have now all but died out.

In Austria, where the right-wing FPÖ won the elections in September with flying colours, people also thought they could use a cordon sanitaire to exclude the FPÖ from coalition negotiations. Suddenly, the negotiations came to nothing and President Alexander Van der Bellen ordered the FPÖ to attempt to form a government. Whether the other parties make the right choice or push for new elections remains to be seen, but the chances of the FPÖ becoming even bigger when that happens, are, as has been shown elsewhere, huge. 

The right-wing European tanker has taken a very long time to get on course due to the enormous opposition, but by all appearances it has succeeded and whether this process can be reversed quickly by the establishment seems very unlikely.