Backgrounder

Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party: What You Need To Know

What is AfD?

Founded in 2013 as an anti-European Union party, AfD has since radicalized and become an extremist, anti-immigrant party whose aim is “to eliminate the free democratic basic order,” according to a 2023 report by the German Institute for Human Rights.

AfD leaders have made antisemitic, anti-Muslim and anti-democratic statements, detailed below.

The German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz or BfV), its domestic intelligence agency which monitors extremist threats to Germany’s democracy, has listed AfD as an officially suspected extremist organization and classified its youth wing, “Young Alternative,” as extremist in April 2023.  The state-level BfV offices in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia have gone a step further and classified the AfD party as a whole as extremist. As a suspected extremist organization, AfD is subject to BfV intelligence collection, including the use of informants and surveillance of individuals and their communications.[1] 

Why is AfD of concern? Nazi slogans, Holocaust trivialization and more.

Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD party in the state of Thuringia, has twice been fined by a German court for using a banned Nazi slogan.  The phrase, “Everything for Germany” (“Alles für Deutschland”) was a slogan of the Nazi stormtroopers and engraved on their daggers.

In a 2017 speech to the AfD youth wing, Höcke bemoaned German’s culture of remembrance of the Holocaust, saying, “We Germans, our people, are the only people in the world who planted a monument of shame in the middle of our national capital.” He called for Germany to stop atoning for Nazi crimes and make a "180-degree turn" in how it remembers its past.

Alexander Gauland, an AfD co-founder, former party leader, and current Member of Parliament, has engaged in Holocaust trivialization on several occasions.  In a 2018 speech to the AfD youth wing, he said, “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”  Gauland also said in 2017 that Germans should be “proud of the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars.”

Höcke has engaged in extremist speech to the extent that a judge ruled that he could be described as a fascist without fear of a defamation suit, because such a description was a “value judgment based on facts.”

AfD leaders have also threatened to deport German citizens of non-ethnic-German heritage.

In its 2017 election manifesto, AfD asserted that the presence of Muslims in Germany was a threat to the country: “Islam does not belong in Germany. The AfD sees the spread of Islam and the presence of over 5 million Muslims, whose numbers are constantly growing, as a great danger to our state, our society and our system of values.”[2]

AfD members were exposed as participants in a November 2023 secret meeting of far-right extremists in Potsdam, including Austrian neo-Nazi Martin Sellner, who discussed a mass deportation plan for foreigners and "non-assimilated" Germans, as part of AfD’s strategy should it be elected to govern Germany.

Following the exposure of the secret meeting, AfD politicians initially denied participating, but just weeks later began actively campaigning with the slogan, “remigration,” which was the term used at the meeting for the mass deportation plan.

The AfD parliamentary group leaders in the eastern German states.
https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/afd-ostdeutschland-remigration-geheimtreffen-potsdam-100.html

This idea is hardly new for AfD.  In 2017, AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland said that Aydan Özoguz,  a Socialist Party politician, who was born in Germany to Turkish immigrant parents, should be “disposed of” in Turkey.   

Current AfD leader, Alice Weidel, then co-leader with Gauland, defended Gauland’s statement.

Why so much concern now?

Germany has federal parliamentary elections on February 23 and AfD is polling at roughly 20%, in second place behind the Christian Democratic Union party at 30%.

In state elections in September 2024, AfD gained significantly, coming in first place in Thuringia with 33% of the vote, and a close second place in Saxony with over 30% of the vote.

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