We Need to Watch the AfD in Germany
We Need to Watch the AfD in Germany
We Need to Watch the AfD in Germany
On Sunday night the numbers from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania were plain. The Alternative for Germany won 38.2 percent of the vote. The Social Democrats were behind it on 35.5 percent and the Christian Democrats, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, fell to 4.9 percent and disappeared from the state parliament. The AfD had won 16.7 percent there in 2021. Five years later it had more than doubled its vote.
Two weeks earlier the same party had taken 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and 39 of the 83 seats in the state parliament. In Thuringia it had already finished first in 2024 with 32.8 percent. At the federal election in February 2025 it won 20.8 percent of the second vote, twice its 2021 share, and became the second-largest party in the Bundestag.
These are no longer scattered protest votes. They form a pattern.
The AfD began in 2013 around opposition to eurozone bailouts. It moved further right during the refugee crisis and immigration became one of the main lines of its politics. Its federal programme uses the word “remigration” for measures that include deporting people who are legally required to leave, tightening citizenship rules and starting return procedures when refugee protection ends. The party also supports lifting sanctions on Russian energy.
That does not mean every AfD voter backs every part of that programme. Parties grow because people vote for them for different reasons. In eastern Germany those reasons include migration, energy prices, jobs, the scars left by reunification and distrust of parties that have governed for decades. The AfD has learned how to gather those complaints and turn them into votes. To understand its rise we have to look at the towns and lives behind the numbers as well as the speeches from party stages.
But the programme and the people who carry it still matter.
There is also an uncomfortable family history around Alice Weidel, one of the AfD’s two federal leaders. Her paternal grandfather, Hans Weidel, joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and the SS in 1933. During the war he became a military judge in occupied Warsaw and later a senior military judge. Research based on German and Polish archival records brought that history back into public view in 2024. Alice Weidel has said she had no relationship with him and did not know about this part of his past. That distinction matters. Children and grandchildren do not inherit political guilt. But the history is still striking in a party that has fought so openly over how Germany should remember the Nazi years. Weidel herself has said Hitler was a communist and a leftist, a claim rejected by historians. The issue is not her bloodline. It is what today’s AfD chooses to say about Germany’s past.
The Saxony-Anhalt branch of the AfD has been classified by the state’s domestic intelligence service as a confirmed right-wing extremist movement. The federal intelligence office tried to apply the same designation to the national party in May 2025. A Cologne court later blocked the use of that designation while the main case proceeds. The legal fight matters, but so does what senior AfD figures themselves say about immigration, German identity, the country’s past and its relationship with Russia.
Germany has strong courts, a federal constitution and a political system built after 1945 with checks on power. The AfD is not the Nazi Party and present-day Germany is not the Weimar Republic. Those comparisons can become lazy and hide more than they show. The reason to watch the AfD is simpler. It is winning large numbers of votes now and that support is already changing German politics.
For now the firewall still matters. Germany’s other main parties refuse coalitions with the AfD. Winning the most votes does not automatically mean taking the state government. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania the SPD could still remain in office through a coalition with the Left and the Greens.
But the firewall also creates its own strain. As the AfD vote rises, the other parties need ever broader coalitions to keep it out of government. Parties with deep differences can find themselves governing together largely because they will not govern with the AfD. That may preserve the firewall, but it can also strengthen the AfD’s claim that the established parties form one bloc against it.
And a party can gain power before it enters a cabinet. A party with 30 or 40 percent of the vote can force every other party to respond to its voters and its issues. It can shift the language used on migration, energy and national identity. It can make each election partly about how to contain it, answer it or win back the people who moved to it.
Germany is not moving in one direction. Berlin voted on the same day and the Left finished first there while the AfD took more than 16 percent. The old centre is being pulled apart from more than one side. Merz called the CDU result in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania a “disaster,” and his party had fallen below five percent for the first time in a German state election.
The AfD may remain outside government in many places. It faces court fights, strong opposition and the limits of Germany’s coalition system. None of that changes the vote. Ten years ago it was a new party at the edge of German politics. Today it is one of the country’s largest political forces and in several eastern states it is the largest.
That is why the AfD needs close attention. Not because Germany is fated to return to its past and not because every person who votes for it can be reduced to one motive, but because a party with this much support can change a country long before it takes control of a government.