The Alternative for Germany, the second largest political party in the Bundestag, is growing stronger, according to a sober and disturbing PBS documentary broadcast last week. In The Rise of Germany’s New Right, correspondent Evan Williams takes a hard look at this ultra right-wing populist party twelve years after its founding and suggests it is expanding its appeal.
In the recent federal election, 21 percent of Germans voted for the AfD, giving it 151 parliamentary seats. And in state elections around the same time in eastern Germany, the party’s stronghold, it scored several victories.
The AfD is on the ascendancy at a moment when like-minded parties in France, Spain and Belgium are making similar gains, noted Williams.
As a party spokesman confidently told him, “We are the party of the future.”
The AfD has attracted more young German voters of late, exploiting their disenchantment with middle-of-the-road parties such as the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats and the Greens.
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, in a speech delivered in Germany earlier this year, said that the AfD has become increasingly mainstream in terms of its base of supporters. And in what was widely regarded as an inappropriate intervention in German politics, he suggested that the “firewall” that bars the AfD from joining national coalition governments should be removed.
Last January, Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire and one of its foreign admirers, delivered a video message to an AfD convention in Halle, where a neo-Nazi attempted to murder Jewish worshippers in a synagogue several years ago. As Musk declared ebulliently, “You’re the last hope for Germany.”
Despite its electoral successes of late, the AfD currently does not administer a single state government. But if the AfD manages to alter the status quo, it would be a watershed moment in Germany’s postwar history.
In the meantime, Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has accused the AfD of providing “a home for antisemites and right-wing extremists.” He has warned that AfD participation in government on the state and national levels would be “a real danger to Jewish life” in the country.
Stephan Kramer, the Jewish director of Thuringia’s intelligence agency, believes that the AfD poses a threat to German democracy. As he put it, “The Germans didn’t invent antisemitism, but they did invent Auschwitz, and this is what we should keep in mind.”
Until recently, the AfD generally tended to be pro-Israel. Last year, however, its co-leader, Tino Chrupalla, demanded an end to Germany’s current “one-sided” relationship with Israel and a cessation of German arms exports to Israel.
Still other AFD members have accused the Israeli army of committing genocide during the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
In January 2025, the AfD’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, expressed support for Israel.
Williams, in a glaring oversight, fails to mention how the AfD responds to Israel and Jews. Nor does he discuss its positions on a wide variety of issues outside immigration. But he does bring Bjorn Hocke, its controversial leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, into the conversation.
He reminds viewers that Hocke once demeaned the Holocaust monument in central Berlin as “a memorial of shame.” Hocke, too, has used a Nazi-era phrase, “Everything to Germany,” in his speeches. A history teacher by profession, he disingenuously tells Williams that he was unaware of its significance and compares it to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” slogan.
Williams contends that Hocke is not the sole AfD member who is soft on Nazi Germany.
Maximilian Krah, who was instrumental in placing the party on social media, has downplayed the Nazi past and insisted that the SS was not a criminal organization. His views notwithstanding, he was allowed to run for a seat in the European Parliament.
Marc Bernhard, another AfD figure, calls for the “reimmigration” of hundreds of thousands of Syrian migrants who poured into Germany from 2015 onward. “They have to go back,” he says emphatically.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has promised never to allow the AfD into his coalition government. But when he was opposition leader, he agreed, in an unprecedented development, to work with the AfD in curbing illegal immigration into Germany.
Williams leaves a viewer with the strong impression that the AfD is on the march. Yet it remains to be seen whether it can win a sufficient number of seats to join a coalition or, in the best-case scenario, to form a national government.
Whatever the future holds, it would be folly to underestimate the AfD.