Radicals are Striving for Power in Germany
The rapid rise in the popularity of the far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which opposes Germany's membership in the EU, is causing concern among politicians in Germany and across Europe. As the regional elections in Bavaria and Hesse approach on October 8, the pro-Kremlin party is adopting an increasingly radical stance. In fact, it has already done so.
Stefan Kramer, the head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Thuringia, stated in an interview with the Israeli channel KAN11 that if Alternative for Germany (AfD) joins the government, he and his family will leave Germany. Nothing more, nothing less.
Photo: Stephan Kramer stated hard. Source: Courtesy of Stephan Kramer
Kramer, who served as the Secretary-General of the Central Council of Jews in Germany for 15 years, made this statement after an AfD candidate Robert Sesselmann won the elections to the district council in the city of Sonneberg. This is the first time that an ultra-right party has won such elections in Germany. Early The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has labeled AfD as right-wing extremists.
Photo: AfD candidate Robert Sesselmann(in center) won the elections to the district council in the city of Sonneberg. Source: AfD bund Instagram.
To top 2 in 10 years
According to a representative survey conducted by the Forsa Institute as of June 13, AfD added 3% compared to the previous month and reached a new peak of 19% support, surpassing the Social Democratic Party led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The research data indicates that AfD's support has risen from 9% in June of last year to 19% currently, making it the second-largest political force in the largest economy in the EU.
Germany and the rest of the world are wondering how this radicalization trend is unfolding.
Sociological research shows that AfD is particularly popular among the working class, mainly among men with a secondary education. AfD voters want less immigration, or preferably none at all. This is a typical profile of ultra-right party supporters in many countries in Western Europe. For example, ultra-right movements are also strong in Austria, where the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) leads in polls with 28.6%, and in France, where the National Front (FN) holds the second position with 24% support (after the left-center political movement The New Ecological and Social People's Union, which has 25% support).
However, the Austrian FPÖ was founded in 1955, and the French FN in 1972. Founded in February 2013, AfD is the youngest among the far-right parties that have entered parliaments in contemporary Europe.
In its very first election to the Bundestag in September 2013, AfD caused a sensation by falling just 0.3% short of surpassing the 5% threshold. Already in May 2014, in the elections to the European Parliament, AfD received 7.1% of the votes, securing 7 seats in the legislative body of the European Union.
After receiving 12.6% of the votes in the 2017 Bundestag elections, AfD became the third-largest political force with 94 representatives. This represented almost a threefold increase in its supporters in just four years.
For contemporary German politics, this was a turning point, as it marked the first time since 1961 that an ultra-right party regained seats in the federal parliament.
Today, AfD is represented in all 16 regional parliaments in Germany, in addition to the federal parliament, the Bundestag, and holds 11 seats in the European Parliament. However, the party is not part of the government coalition.
Recent opinion polls suggest that AfD may aim for new ambitious goals. And there is an interesting opportunity. The main opposition party in Germany, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is calling for a parliamentary investigation into Scholz's possible involvement in the tax evasion scandal of over €30 billion. If these investigations lead to early elections, AfD will likely benefit the most from them.
Masters of Words
Previously, far-right parties in Germany aimed for no more 2-6% of the electorate. However, AfD broke the tradition by going online.
Since its establishment in 2013, AfD's strategy has heavily relied on Facebook to spread its messages. During the 2017 parliamentary campaign, the party honed its online methods: research from the University of Oxford showed that AfD was the most active German political force on Twitter.
At that time, ten years ago, AfD hired the American agency Harris Media, known for its digital campaigns for Donald Trump in the US presidential elections and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which advocated for Brexit.
Today, AfD has the largest presence among all German political forces on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Telegram, and has its own party media.
By breaking societal taboos and using calculated provocations while criticizing "political correctness," AfD attracted significant attention from the media, thereby making the party an integral part of public discourse.
The party's success in the 2017 elections was also aided by the migration crisis triggered by the war in Syria. AfD amplified the significance of immigration as a political issue.
Since its founding, AfD members have presented themselves as independent fighters against a corrupt political system, but this did not add sharpness to their communications. However, when the German federal government decided to allow entry to refugees in September 2015, and 890,000 individuals applied for asylum, AfD seized the opportunity and raised a strong voice of outrage. Subsequently, AfD focused on immigrants in electoral campaigns and public appearances, becoming increasingly radical.
The sharp rhetoric led AfD to the Bundestag in 2017. After that, there were initial hopes that the party would move towards more moderate positions. However, within a year, after a series of racist scandals in local elections, Berlin realized that AfD was not moving towards the center; this party was radicalizing.
AfD began to be called a "threat to democracy."
Regional Extremism
The backbone of the AfD electorate is located in the eastern German states of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia, where local parliamentary elections will take place in 2024. It is in the former East Germany where lower employment rates and slower economic development are still observed.
So, is AfD the "East German party"? Don't rush to conclusions: many AfD supporters live in the southern parts of the country, in the wealthiest federal states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.
It was in these prosperous states that, in December 2022, the largest operation in Germany's history took place, involving 3,000 police officers, security forces, and special units, resulting in the arrest of half of the conspirators from the far-right movement known as ReichsBürger [Reich Citizens]. They had planned to storm the parliament building and seize power in Berlin.
Reich Citizens reject the post-war constitution of Germany and call for the overthrow of the government. The suspects intended to create 286 private security companies that would carry out arrests and executions after a coup. During the investigation, several "enemy lists" were discovered, allegedly containing the names of politicians, government members, and Bundestag representatives. "It has been demonstrated that the biggest threat of terrorism today in western countries comes from the extreme right, neo-Nazis, and white supremacy," said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in response to this event.
The Reich Citizens movement in Germany has 23,000 followers and has long been under the scrutiny of the German police due to violent attacks, racism, and anti-Semitism. In other words, it poses a real threat to democratic principles and values.
But how is AfD connected to this conspiracy? It came under the radar of law enforcement agencies in 2021.
Photo: Dietmar Schilff, deputy federal chairman of the Police Union (GdP) - AfD organized mass demonstrations, attracting right-wing extremists, anti-Semites, Reich Citizens, and other conspiracy theorists. Source: GdP
During the height of the COVID-19 crisis, AfD organized mass demonstrations, attracting right-wing extremists, anti-Semites, Reich Citizens, and other conspiracy theorists. According to Dietmar Schilff, deputy federal chairman of the Police Union (GdP), this was confirmed by German intelligence data. According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, ethno-nationalist forces have gained influence within the AfD. "Their goal is to provoke and stage events to attract media attention and use democratic means to destroy democracy," stated the GdP.
In the center of the December scandal was Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, a member of the Bundestag from AfD between 2017 and 2021, who was one of the 25 suspects arrested during the morning raids in 11 German states.
As a member of parliament, Malsack-Winkemann had privileged access to the complex of buildings in the Bundestag and information regarding its security measures. The events of December 2022 recall an incident in 2020 when aggressive demonstrators protesting COVID-19 restrictions managed to enter the Bundestag using visitor passes obtained through AfD parliamentarians.
On the Path to Ban?
In 2021, German intelligence agencies were granted the right to monitor AfD members and even listen to their conversations due to suspicions of extremism. In 2022, a German court ruled that the far-right AfD party posed a threat to democracy and allowed the country's security services to continue surveillance on them.
Furthermore, a study published by the German Institute for Human Rights (Deutsche Institut für Menschenrechte - DIMR) on June 7, 2023, states that AfD now poses such a danger to the country's democratic order that "it may be banned by the Federal Constitutional Court."
The DIMR's expert opinion asserts that AfD actively and systematically works "to achieve its racist and right-wing extremist goals" and seeks to "shift the boundaries of discourse so that people become accustomed to its racist nationalist positions." The DIMR believes that AfD may be legally banned since its explicit objectives are "to destroy the free democratic basic order" and "abolish the guarantees of human dignity" enshrined in Germany's constitution.
Billionaires' Party for Workers
Paradoxically, it is no secret to the wide German public that the far-right party has always benefited from the support of big money. German media managed to uncover and confirm the involvement of the country's wealthiest individuals in funding the AfD. Among them is billionaire August von Finck Jr. (1930-†2021), an inherited banker whose father was a Hitler supporter and financially supported the Nazis.
Photo: the billionaire Eurosceptic billionaire August von Finck Jr. (1930-†2021) was one of the first sponsors of the AfD. Source: Getty Image.
An investigation by SPIEGEL reveals that the billionaire Eurosceptic was one of the first sponsors of the AfD and provided generous funding for its activities through a communications agency in Munich. According to the publication, prior to the 2017 elections, he financed the creation and launch of the newspaper "Deutschland Kurier," which had a circulation of 600,000 copies and was distributed for free in Berlin, promoting the AfD's electoral program.
The AfD employed a financing scheme through marketing activities introduced by von Finck within the party and with other donors. As a result, the party, which initially positioned itself as a fighter against political corruption, became entangled in an endless corruption scandal. In 2020, the AfD had to pay a fine of over half a million euros for accepting illegal donations for its election campaign from Switzerland, but the case did not stop there.
The traces of the financial chain led the prosecutors to another German billionaire, Henning Conle (born in 1944), whose family became wealthy in the real estate market. A regular on the Sunday Times Rich List of the wealthiest people in Great Britain, Rich Conle, through his Luxembourg company Sirosa, owns some of London's most prominent commercial properties worth £2 billion: Shell Mex Building, Kensington Roof Gardens, Plaza shopping center on Oxford Street, and Stratton House, the London headquarters of Manchester United Football Club.
German law enforcement authorities believe that the AfD has been receiving covert funding from the businessman for years, particularly for its extensive activities on social media. The marketing campaigns of the AfD on Facebook and Twitter were financed not from the party's coffers but from the billionaire's pocket. A Swiss advertising agency involved in organizing the AfD's election campaign in 2017 is also implicated in the case. Sponsorship contributions through third parties connected to Conle were also identified in local elections in 2018. In November 2022, the State Criminal Police Office of Berlin (LKA Berlin) conducted further searches at the AfD headquarters and its affiliated offices. The investigation into numerous episodes is ongoing.
Radicals with Bear Ears: AfD's Controversial Ties
It has been repeatedly claimed that the AfD is financed by the Kremlin, although there is no concrete evidence to support this. However, it is evident that the Eurosceptic party in Germany, known for its anti-Americanism and opposition to LGBTQ+ equality, has become a favorite of Moscow.
Photo: Markus Frohnmaier, an AfD member of parliament, promised. Source: Bundestag
Since its inception, the AfD has actively sought contacts with Moscow, and there have been ongoing interactions between the party members and Russian officials. Der Spiegel, in collaboration with the Dossier Center in London, reported that Markus Frohnmaier, an AfD member of parliament, promised the Russian Embassy in Berlin a "fully controlled representative in the Bundestag" in their correspondence.
Today, there are dozens of such representatives who knowingly allow themselves to be used by Russia in its information war. Members of the AfD, often referred to as "Putinversteher" (Putin understanders) in Germany, echo Kremlin narratives, claiming that the war in Ukraine was provoked by the United States and that Russia was merely defending itself against NATO's encroachment while protecting Russian-speaking communities in eastern Ukraine. AfD politicians visit occupied Crimea, attend ceremonial events at the Russian Embassy in Berlin, grant interviews to Russian propagandists, including Vladimir Solovyov, who advocates for war against Ukraine and even calls for a "preemptive nuclear strike" against the West. In response, Moscow generously sponsors their trips to Russia, arranging private planes, luxurious hotels, palace receptions, and entertainment.
In April 2023, The Washington Post obtained documents that revealed direct attempts by the Kremlin to interfere in German politics, aiming to form a new coalition of far-right and far-left parties and support extremist protests against the German government. The Russian strategy, dating back to September 2022, aimed to achieve a "majority in elections at any level" in Germany and to boost AfD's rating beyond the 13% it had at the time.
According to confirmed sources, the Kremlin instructed its political technologists to focus on Germany in order to generate anti-war sentiments in Europe and weaken support for Ukraine. The proposed reboot, outlined in the Kremlin's strategy, includes transforming the AfD into a party of "German unity" and declaring sanctions against Russia that contradict Germany's interests.
Upcoming Local Elections
Sociological surveys indicate a growing populist sentiment in society, particularly after the German government approved immigration reform, professional training, and incentives for citizens from outside the EU to relocate to Germany in March 2023. AfD benefits from economic problems, high inflation rates, and the costly implementation of EU's "green policies."
The rise of AfD is primarily driven by protest voters, but not exclusively so. The party also attracts a "solid" electorate with high incomes. AfD thrives on conflicts where it positions itself against all others. In polarizing issues such as migration or climate protection, choosing AfD becomes an easy decision for citizens who share their stance, as there is no other party with a similar position.
Typically, German voters express their reactions to federal political issues during local elections, sending a specific signal to the federal government in Berlin. The government should be wary: on June 21, 2023, AfD announced its intention to nominate a candidate for chancellor in the 2025 federal elections. Other parties in the Bundestag currently reject cooperation with AfD. However, at the local level, political forces will be forced to collaborate with AfD representatives in various electoral positions.
While debates continue about banning the party in Germany, an endeavor that would be nearly impossible from a constitutional standpoint, AfD has seized the opportunity and turned their condemnation into a rallying cry for their supporters. By announcing their own candidate for chancellor, AfD has once again garnered increased media attention, which could reflect in the results of the regional election campaigns in October.