Introduction
Founded in April 2013, the party won 4.7% of the votes in the 2013 federal election, narrowly missing the 5% electoral threshold to sit in the Bundestag. In 2014 the party won 7.1% of the votes and 7 out of 96 German seats in the European election, and was a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group until AfD was expelled from that group in April 2016, following AfD's alliance with the Freedom Party of Austria and after AfD leaders made controversial remarks about shooting immigrants.
As of May 2017, the AfD had gained representation in 13 of the 16 German state parliaments. The party is currently led by Frauke Petry and Jörg Methuen.The AfD's initial supporters were the same prominent economists, business leaders and journalists who had supported the Electoral Alternative 2013, including former members of the Christian Democratic Union, who had previously challenged the constitutionality of the German government's eurozone policies at the German Constitutional Court.
Political move
If the AfD intends to transcend its role as a protest group, it “needs to decide what sort of party it wants to be,” said Konstantin Vössing, a political scientist at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Founded as a technocratic, anti-European Union party, it no longer has a clear economic message, he said, and has not been able to seize the right flank of Merkel’s party, left open by her centrist stance on issues such as immigration, the environment and same-sex marriage.
The party’s conflicting instincts were on display last month, when Alice Weidel, a 38-year-old lesbian mother and one of the party’s two leading candidates, addressed reporters in Berlin, seeking to distance herself from the party’s harsher strains of cultural and religious nationalism. She said she welcomed migrants who integrated into German society and regretted a campaign advertisement pairing the belly of a pregnant woman with the pronouncement “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves.”
A day earlier, the other leading candidate, Alexander Gauland, 76, told supporters that the government’s integration commissioner, Aydan Ozoguz, who has Turkish roots, could learn about national culture by coming to Eichsfeld, the district in central Germany where he was speaking.
“Then she’ll never come here again, and we will, thank God, be able to dispose of her in Anatolia,” he said, in remarks described by a former federal judge as incitement to hatred in violation of Germany’s criminal code.
The two styles create a cacophonous message — with many notes still proof, for the party’s critics, that it is beyond the pale. But the different approaches may also help the relatively new bloc cast a wide net.
The important point for some supporters is that the AfD is challenging the political establishment — and the behavioral codes it upholds. Max Naegele, a 50-year-old postal worker in Augsburg, in southern Germany, acknowledged the party’s blemishes but declared himself “sick and tired of hearing the same old story. Every day I go to work and I’m poorer than the day before.”
“Then she’ll never come here again, and we will, thank God, be able to dispose of her in Anatolia,” he said, in remarks described by a former federal judge as incitement to hatred in violation of Germany’s criminal code.
The two styles create a cacophonous message — with many notes still proof, for the party’s critics, that it is beyond the pale. But the different approaches may also help the relatively new bloc cast a wide net.
The important point for some supporters is that the AfD is challenging the political establishment — and the behavioral codes it upholds. Max Naegele, a 50-year-old postal worker in Augsburg, in southern Germany, acknowledged the party’s blemishes but declared himself “sick and tired of hearing the same old story. Every day I go to work and I’m poorer than the day before.”
I But others are backing away. Uli Heinemann, a retired engineer in Anklam, a stronghold of the far right in eastern Germany, has voted for the AfD before but planned to support Merkel’s party this fall.
“I voted for the AfD because I wanted to try something different,” said Heinemann, 72. “I liked that they were against the massive influx of refugees.”
Two years later, he said, the AfD’s dire predictions have not come true. “This year, I will vote for the CDU. Mrs. Merkel is leading in a pretty clever way. She’s calm and unemotional.”
Luisa Beck contributed to this report.
“I voted for the AfD because I wanted to try something different,” said Heinemann, 72. “I liked that they were against the massive influx of refugees.”
Two years later, he said, the AfD’s dire predictions have not come true. “This year, I will vote for the CDU. Mrs. Merkel is leading in a pretty clever way. She’s calm and unemotional.”
Luisa Beck contributed to this report.
