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🇮🇪 Ireland /Elections & Politics

What is the AfD? Germany’s far-right party explained

From RTÉ News · () English

Translated from English and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Explainer Named sources Context piece
  • The AfD consistently polled around 20% ahead of the German election, presenting a new challenge to mainstream parties’ cordon sanitaire.
  • Founded in 2013 as an anti-euro party, it entered the Bundestag in 2017 with 12.6% of the vote and 94 seats.
  • Leadership changes from 2015 to 2017 pushed the party toward harder positions on immigration, Islam and national identity, leading the article to classify it as far right.

Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland is polling around 20% ahead of the election, a level that threatens to break the mainstream parties’ long-standing strategy of keeping the far right isolated. The party’s rise stands out in a country where the legacy of authoritarianism and National Socialism once made far-right movements political pariahs.

party of professors

· Not attributedA label used to describe the AfD’s early support among academics.

For decades, political elites, established parties, the media and civil society marginalized the far right and limited its electoral prospects. The AfD shattered that arrangement in the 2017 federal election. It won 12.6% of the vote and 94 seats in the Bundestag, becoming Germany’s third-largest party and opening viable political space to the right of the CDU/CSU for the first time in the postwar era.

The party began in 2013 with a much narrower identity. Disaffected CDU members, including economics professors Bernd Lucke and Joachim Starbatty, and conservative journalists Konrad Adam and Alexander Gauland, founded it as an anti-euro movement. Its first Bundestag manifesto ran to four pages and focused exclusively on dissolving the Eurozone. The party supported political asylum for persecuted people and initially avoided harsh anti-immigrant and anti-Islam rhetoric, cultivating a more bourgeois image.

unusual gravitas

· Not attributedA phrase describing the credibility that academics and former mainstream politicians gave the young protest party.

That early profile gave the AfD what political scientist Elisabeth Ivarsflaten called a “reputational shield”, a legacy it could use against accusations of extremism. But leadership changes between 2015 and 2017 brought a harder line, particularly on immigration, Islam and national identity. By 2016, its platform broadly matched those of populist radical-right parties elsewhere. The article describes the far right as an umbrella encompassing both illiberal-democratic radical-right movements and anti-democratic extreme-right forces, characterized ideologically by nativism and authoritarianism. In Germany, nativism also carries the historical legacy of völkisch nationalism.

reputational shield

· Elisabeth IvarsflatenThe political scientist’s description of the AfD’s early bourgeois image and its protection against stigma.
About this summary

Originally published by RTÉ News in English. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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