AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) is a radical right-wing political party in Germany, which was founded a decade ago as a party that only appealed to the marginal extreme right. But in recent years, its popularity has gradually increased to a prominent degree. Due to Germany and Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis, immigrants have been part of the government agenda for years, and AfD, openly campaigning anti-immigrant sentiments, has been able to represent the voices of citizens opposed to opening up borders. But along the way, AfD is also receiving criticism for its racist and xenophobic undertones redolent of the rhetoric of Donald Trump, causing concerns over implications on the future of Germany and Europe.

Germany’s political party system includes many parties that represent diverse interests: The Left, Social Democrats, Greens, Liberals and Christian Democrats (CDU). The Economist reported in July 2023 that AfD benefitted from the anxiety induced by the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015, taking up 13 percent of the national vote in 2017 and sending 94 members of parliament (MPs) to the 709-seat Bundestag. Public support for AfD is growing steadily.

The Rise of AfD and the Far Right in Europe

AfD is mostly popular in economically underprivileged areas, such as eastern states like Thuringia and Saxony, regions in which unemployment is higher than in the west, as proven by the Statista data on unemployment by state. In such states where frail public infrastructure offers little room for growth, young people move away when they get the chance. After the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic in 1990, West Germany has always been more developed economically compared to East Germany, fueling resentment among the Eastern Germans. Sociologist Oliver Nachtwey has said that “the state appears to have failed in its duty to provide a social safety net and sense of solidarity,” and therefore AfD’s opposition to supposed state overreach, such as coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine mandates, attracted many who had already been disillusioned with the state.

According to the New York Times, AfD’s rise also coincided with the rise of other radically conservative groups across the country, such as underground right-wing networks, coordinated white supremacist attacks, and neo-Nazis, illustrating the generally rising hostility towards immigrants and dissatisfaction with the state’s handling of immigration. The party is thus stoking controversy with its extremist rhetoric, and the German Institute for Human Rights has released a study arguing that the language and tactics used by AfD “to achieve its racist and right-wing extremist goals” could meet conditions for banning the party as a “danger to the free democratic order.” Björn Höcke, chairman of AfD in Thuringia, was even once charged for using a Nazi slogan.

There seem to be two types of reactions to this phenomenon; some are alarmed and concerned that this rightwing populist revival will threaten the pillars of liberal democracy, and others suggest that AfD is satisfying demands of a part of the electorate that have been ignored by existing parties. Professor Chris Schneider (German Language and Literature) from Germany suggests that the rise of AfD may be considered a sign of the failure of centrist politics. A general trend in European politics had long been the mainstream shift to left-wing politics, widely supporting the implementation of gender-neutral language or women’s quotas – but the political parties in Germany failed to represent the interests of opponents. “AfD is filling a [needed] conservative void within the democratic landscape,” said Professor Schneider.

The rise of right-wing politics, however, is not limited to Germany; this seems to be a wider pan-European trend that has been brewing for the past couple of years. According to the September 2023 Briefing by The Economist, Italy’s current prime minister is Giorgia Meloni of the hard-right party Brothers of Italy, and now, the right-wing Marine Le Pen is showing strong indications of winning the 2027 French presidential election. 

European Multiculturalism

In light of the refugee crisis that underpins right-wing discourse, many have commented that “multicultural policies” that sought to diversify Europe had mostly been counterproductive, much less successful. With the large influx of immigrants flooding Europe from 2015 onwards, Europe was under even more pressure to amend their immigration and integration policies now publicly brought to the fore. However, as columnist Kenan Malik argued in Financial Review in 2015, while different countries in Europe have all deployed different strategies for multiculturalism, they have all eventually led to the marginalization and isolation of immigrant groups from mainstream society, breeding resentment instead of intercultural exchange.

Germany is an example of this failure of early government multicultural policies. Post-World War II Germany attracted many new short-term “guestworkers” from Turkey, many of whom actually ended up staying much longer. Today, about 6.5 percent of the German population – 5.5 million – are Muslim. However, Germany required the parents to be citizens for citizenship, limiting full integration, and that the policies of the German government created parallel communities, or “Parallelgesellschaft,” in which the “mainstream” Germans and “minority” Turks are separated both geographically, such as in terms of housing, and culturally, in terms of contact and values. The immigrants were not provided with adequate incentive to actively integrate into mainstream society such as via learning German. Professor Schneider comments that the lack of workplace integration and dissemination of “German values” have been big problems. “We cannot demand integration and not offer the proper resources for integration,” added Schneider.

While it is true that government strategies substantially deterred successful integration, it is also difficult to ignore that the culture of intolerance towards immigrant cultures is concerningly rampant. German domestic intelligence services (BfV) reported that the Saxony-Anhalt AfD is aspiring Germany to be a “homogenous ethnocultural nation.” The issue is that “German values” often become conflated with white superiority coupled with hatred and repression of minority groups within the country. This has been especially exacerbated by the perception that Islam is a backwards religion, with Muslim women often being targets of violence, most notably the 2020 terrorist attack by a right-wing extremist in Hanau. The rise of the rightwing party of AfD coincides with this public malaise.