Who Are the Alternative For Deutschland?

The far right AfD have won just over 20% of votes in the German elections. But who are this controversial party and what do they stand for?

The party was a breakaway from the establishment parties and was founded in 2013 by a former Tory style politician, Bernd Lucke. He was an economics professor and adviser to the World Bank. He was joined by journalist Konrad Adam - who frequently attacked the welfare state in his articles.

The party attracted members of the German equivalent of bosses union IBEC and attacked the EU and the welfare state. Their founders were second rate Tories looking for an audience using anti-Islamic rhetoric combined with anti-worker economics.

In Sept 2013 they won 4.7% of the vote in the federal election but missed the 5% threshold needed to get into the parliament.

In 2014 they had massive internal debates about whether to sit with other establishment Tory type parties in the EU parliament or align themselves with the likes of Nigel Farage and the French National Rally.

Bernd Lucke lost the leadership to Frauke Petry, a capitalist who ran PURinvent, a Leipzig-based manufacturer of polyurethane tire fill products. Lucke jumped ship and founded a new party. The AfD lurched further to the right.

One study of AfD voters noted how they were winning those who were critical of social welfare supports given to the poor and to immigrants.

These former establishment politicians and members of the boss class were able to divert anger over the economic system they support onto refugees, thereby weakening working class opposition to the system.

5 MEPs left the party as it lurched rightwards, the AfD announcing in 2016 that they would ally with the fascist Freedom Party of Austria. In regional elections they began to win much higher votes.

They went chasing racist votes adopting the slogan “Islam is not a part of Germany” and demanding a ban on mosques and veils. But they fell in polls, from 15% to just 7%, and this sparked another internal fight over leadership.

Alexander Gauland was chosen as leader. He’d previously worked as a bureaucrat heading a government ministry and was another former Tory. In the 2017 federal election, the AfD won 12.6% and 94 seats.

The AfD saw a dip in their national vote share, getting 10.3% of the vote in 2021 but performed well in the former Eastern Europe. By July 2023 polls showed that the AfD was winning more voters than the Labour Party type SPD.

The SPD called for banning the AfD. But this just made the SPD look like a wing of the establishment calling for a ban on a supposed threat. The AfD were as establishment as they come but they were being allowed to posture as opposition by the soft left.

When news broke that the AfD had secretly met with European fascist parties to discuss mass deportations they backtracked in the German media. They understood that their more extreme views needed to be spoken quietly.

Former party MEP Hans-Olaf Henkel compared the AfD’s early platform to the Conservative Party in Britain. But by 2023 explicitly fascist factions such as Der Flügel were pushing for more hardline policies.

The party is still an alliance between a Thatcherite wing and a hardline fascist wing.

15% of AfD supporters think the Holocaust was fiction while in 2017 many of their elected reps were caught participating in social media groups praising Hitler and fascism.

They want to perpetuate economic inequality, their economic policy platform is Thatcherite, arguing for selling off public services and state assets. Meanwhile they hide this by directing anger and alienation against oppressed social groups.

They also strongly oppose women’s rights and want to ban “male circumcision” - which is effectively a ban on Judaism.

Alice Weidel became leader in 2022. She’d worked for Goldman Sachs Asset Management. She also worked at Bank of China and for Allianz Global Investors. The Switzerland-based property billionaire Henning Conle donated a total of 132,000 euros to her campaign in 2017.

This hedge fund parasite, backed by property developers, wants German workers focused on immigrants while her and her rich mates bleed workers dry. She says Margaret Thatcher is her “role model”.

In the 2025 elections they won 20.8% of the vote beating the Corbyn style Left Party (who got 8.77%) and the Blairite SPD (who got 16.41%). Among young voters the radical left got 24% of votes to the AfD’s 20%.

In the capital Berlin the AfD only got 15% of the vote while the Left Party got 20% with the SPD getting 15%. Nationally the SPD lost 720,000 voters to the AfD and 560,000 voters to the Left Party. They also lost 2 million voters to the Tories.

While the Blairite left vote fractured left and right, the Left Party won over 700,000 Green voters but lost 110,000 voters to the AfD. The connection between the AfD and Tory voters was clearly evident in their winning of 1 million voters from the traditional right CDU/CSU.

The AfD’s leader Alice Weidel boasted that the CDU had “lifted” her party’s programme “almost 100 percent”.

The story is the same in country after country - the far right gain votes, the establishment uses this as an excuse to shift right, this emboldens the far right and the political spectrum as a whole lurches rightwards.

The establishment will have been watching the recent protests against the far right across Germany and may hold off coalition with the AfD for now. But a “grand coalition” of the Tory right with the SPD and Greens will see the soft left discredit the left and offer the role of opposition to the far right.

If the far right can posture as a “radical” opposition while the left act as pets of the establishment then the far right will continue to grow. If the left continues to posture on social issues without addressing key economic concerns then the far right will continue to grow.

If the left doesn’t fight to merge socialist politics with the best of the working class, then the far right will continue to grow.

We need a new kind of revolutionary left, one that can link fighting for the day to day concerns of working class people - on housing, for better wages - with the need for a working class revolt against capitalism.

The Red Network want to build such a fighting, working class left. Join us.