The AfD’s transformation has been calculated and strategic. Initially formed as a eurosceptic party capturing just 4.7 percent in 2013 federal elections, it has metastasised into Germany’s second-largest party, securing an alarming 20.8 percent of votes. This dramatic ascent was no accident—recognising that blatant neo-Nazi rhetoric offered no viable path forward, the party’s architects executed a masterful deception, initially presenting a moderate face by supporting asylum while avoiding inflammatory language to secure their foothold, then methodically embracing increasingly radical positions once established.
Today, the party advocates for “remigration", a sanitised term for mass deportation of people from migrant backgrounds, which has found its most fertile ground in eastern Germany, where its candidates have captured up to 32.8% in recent state elections. Most troubling is their success in Thuringia, where they secured state leadership under Björn Höcke, a controversial figure whom German courts held in 2019 could legally be characterised as a “fascist.” In 2024, Höcke received two convictions for using phrases associated with prohibited Nazi terminology.
Today, the party advocates for “remigration", a sanitised term for mass deportation of people from migrant backgrounds ...
The economic landscape provides critical context for this political shift. Eastern Germany's “great transformation” following reunification inflicted profound wounds that have never fully healed—aggressive deindustrialisation, contentious privatisation programmes, and entrenched inequality generated legitimate grievances that simmer beneath the surface of democratic politics. The stark reality reveals Western Germans enjoying net wealth four times greater than their Eastern counterparts, creating a persistent economic divide across the supposedly unified nation. The region has suffered devastating demographic hemorrhaging leaving behind communities increasingly defined by isolation and resentment. When these long-standing disparities collide with Germany's recent economic contraction—amplified by the dual shocks of pandemic disruption and energy crisis—they create perfect breeding grounds for populist exploitation, fertilising the soil where radical politics now flourishes with frightening efficiency.
But economic factors alone cannot explain the AfD’s metastatic growth. Eastern Germany’s distinctive cultural homogeneity—an artefact of the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR’s) isolation from the labour migration waves that transformed and diversified western German society—has left many communities with severely limited intercultural exposure and experience. This cultural insularity created a vulnerability that AfD strategists expertly exploited when Angela Merkel, who served as chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021, opened Germany’s borders to over a million asylum seekers during the Syrian 2015-16 crisis. Their calculated rhetoric attacking “headscarf girls” and dismissing the possibility of a democratic Islam as “empty fantasies of round squares” found particularly receptive audiences in communities unaccustomed to multicultural negotiation.
The AfD’s (and equally Trump’s administration) recurring assertion that “hardly anyone dares express their opinion freely anymore” exposes their most effective manipulation technique. This manufactured victimhood narrative directly echoes Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda technique of portraying extremists as persecuted truth-tellers. By positioning themselves as courageous voices breaking through oppressive silence, the AfD inverts reality— positioning radical views as forbidden truths rather than extremism. This strategy doesn’t merely exploit economic anxieties—it weaponises democratic freedoms against democracy itself.
... the AfD inverts reality— positioning radical views as forbidden truths rather than extremism.
While established parties have refused coalition with the AfD, the political landscape remains precarious. Even without an absolute majority, the party could wield significant obstructionist power, potentially creating a “blocking minority” for major decisions requiring constitutional alterations. It must be remembered that Hitler’s Nazi party only won 18 percent in 1930 and 33 percent in the last free elections in 1932.
Germany’s constitution does provide mechanisms to declare parties hostile to democratic principles and potentially abolish them or cut off state financing. But the threshold for such actions is necessarily high in a functioning democracy, and merely initiating this process carries profound implications. To ban a political party with substantial electoral support risks alienating millions of voters, undermining the very democratic principles such a ban would aim to protect. Yet failing to act against parties that explicitly challenge democratic norms creates the opportunity for extreme populist parties to flourish—what Jason Stanley, the author of the magisterial How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, terms “the paradox of tolerance.” This paradox tests the very boundaries of democratic tolerance and exposes the central vulnerability of open societies that Stanley identifies as fascism’s primary entry point.
The current European “Right Moment” shows populist right-wing parties once relegated to the fringe now flourishing across the continent. Vlaams Belang gains strength in Belgium; hard-right governments rule Hungary, Italy, and Poland; Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland share power with similar parties; France’s National Rally and Reconquest combine for 29% of votes; the Netherlands' right-wing populists claim a quarter of votes; and even Portugal, Romania, and Spain—democracies that long resisted nationalist parties—now harbour them.
The current European “Right Moment” shows populist right-wing parties once relegated to the fringe now flourishing across the continent.
This continental and equally domestic rightward drift of mainstream parties has standardised the AfD’s once-fringe platform. We’re witnessing exactly what Stanley described as “normalisation”—the process where fascist rhetoric becomes acceptable through the blurring of conventional conservatism and extreme racial ideologies.
As we witness democratic institutions bend under this pressure across Europe and beyond, a question emerges: How many historical warnings must we ignore before recognising that democracy’s greatest threat comes not from dramatic coups, but from this slow erosion of norms that happens in plain sight, with tacit public consent?