BERLIN — The once-shunned conservative Alternative for Germany party is poised for its strongest national election result yet this month and is fielding its first candidate for chancellor. Even though it’s highly unlikely to take a share of power in Berlin soon, it has become a factor that other politicians can’t ignore and has re-shaped Germany’s debate on migration.
The far-right party first entered Germany’s national parliament eight years ago on the back of popular opposition to the arrival of large numbers of migrants in the mid-2010s, and curbing migration remains its signature theme. But the party has proven adept at harnessing discontent with other issues: Germany’s move away from fossil fuels, restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, and support for Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion nearly three years ago.
Alternative for Germany, or AfD, was founded in 2013 and initially focused on opposition to bailouts for struggling countries in the eurozone debt crisis — measures that then Chancellor Angela Merkel described as “without alternative.”
Over the years, however, AfD became more radical and repeatedly changed leaders. It was Ms. Merkel’s decision in 2015 to allow in large numbers of migrants, many from Syria and Afghanistant, that supercharged it as a political force, and in the 2017 national election, it won 12.6% of the vote to take seats in the German parliament for the first time.
After returning to parliament in 2021 with reduced support of 10.3%, AfD picked up strength as Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left government bickered through a series of crises — some of its own making — and finally collapsed.
With just days to go before the vote, the party’s signature issue was back in the headlines Thursday when a driver believed to be an Afghan asylum-seeker, drove a car into a labor union demonstration in central Munich, injuring 30 people including children, authorities said. The incident follows a series of attacks involving immigrants in recent months that have pushed migration to the forefront of the campaign for Germany’s Feb. 23 election.
The party finished second in the European Parliament election in June, and in September, the best-known figure on its hardest-right wing, Bjorn Hoecke, secured the first far-right win in a state election in post-World War II Germany.
AfD is going into the vote with renewed confidence and radical language. Alice Weidel, its first candidate for chancellor, has embraced the term “remigration” as the party calls for large-scale deportations of people with no legal entitlement to be in Germany.
The party calls for the immediate lifting of sanctions against Russia and opposes weapons deliveries to Ukraine. It wants Germany to reintroduce a national currency and for the European Union to be turned into a looser “association of European nations,” though it isn’t explicitly advocating leaving the 27-nation bloc.
AfD has support across Germany and is represented in all but two of the 16 state legislatures, but the party is strongest in the formerly communist and less prosperous east.
It has a unique ability to seize on issues “that other parties don’t handle with this clarity, with this intensity, with this radicalism and this emotionality,” said Wolfgang Schroeder, a political science professor at the Berlin Social Science Center. “And on top of that, it’s an internet party and from the beginning used the emotionalizing power of the internet for its own communication — much better than all other German parties together.”
AfD’s rise has coincided with that of far-right parties in many other European countries, including Austria’s Freedom Party and the National Rally in France, with which it has plenty of common ground. Ms. Weidel was in Budapest this week to visit Hungarian conservative nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
However, it isn’t part of those parties’ Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament after some tensions before last year’s EU elections. AfD was thrown out of one of the group’s predecessors after its leading candidate at the time, Maximilian Krah, said that not all Nazi SS men “were necessarily criminals.”
The party has found an enthusiastic supporter in billionaire Elon Musk, who has emerged as a top ally and adviser to President Donald Trump. Mr. Musk has declared that “only the AfD can save Germany.” He held a live chat on X with Ms. Weidel and appeared live by video link at an AfD campaign rally.
At that rally, Ms. Weidel vowed to “make Germany great again” in an echo of the U.S. president’s slogan.
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