How the AfD and its frontrunners “manipulate” young people

The AfD continues to lead the polls in the East. A propagandist from the extreme right now openly admits that he wants to “manipulate” young people.

Berlin – In the partial repeat of the federal election in Berlin, the right-wing extremists were able to do so in parts AfD significantly improve your results. The suspected terrorist AfD candidate Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, who is in custody, also received more than 9,000 first votes, slightly more than in the 2021 federal election. In the meantime, she was imprisoned because of her suspected involvement in the right-wing extremist terrorist group led by Heinrich Reuß. A look at the AfD's media strategy in the European and state election campaign year, which includes the Correctiv revelations about the Potsdam secret meeting and Mass demonstrations against the deportation plans hatched there began.

An analysis by political consultant Johannes Hillje for the weekend provided an indication of the reasons for the right-wing extremist election and survey successes ZDF. Hillje examined the social media accounts of the parliamentary parties between January 2022 and December 2023. It came to the conclusion that the AfD's content was viewed, shared, liked and commented on significantly more often than that of the other parliamentary parties. The TikTok platform in particular stood out during the study period. With 430 million views, the AfD achieved more than twice as many as all other parliamentary parties represented on the platform. The Left, FDP, CSU and SPD received a total of around 140 million views.

TikTok for AfD “Key to young voters”.

This does not include right-wing, libertarian or misogynist influencers, some of whom spread similar theories. The central target group on TikTok is teenagers. According to Hillje, the platform is “the key to the young electorate” for the party. The expert's diagnosis: The AfD operates its social media accounts with considerable expenditure of resources and its MPs focus their parliamentary speeches on the widest possible reach. The whole thing is also being spread via “networks” from the youth party organization Junge Alternative (JA), which the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has classified as “safe right-wing extremist,” and right-wing extremist actors in the party’s ranks. The latter mainly come from the orbit of the right-wing extremist “Identitarian Movement” (IB).

This also applies to one of the strategists behind the right-wing TikTok offensive. Erik Ahrens, right-wing extremist and former social media advisor to AfD European candidate Maximilian Krah, says he is currently writing a book about “ethnic Germans” and “the natural elite”. He trivializes this as “biopolitics”. Ahrens confirmed via In a lecture at the right-wing extremist academic association “Institute for State Politics”, he compared TikTok and the opportunities that the AfD and its frontrunners had there with the invention of radio in the 1920s.

AfD European top candidate Krah successful with sexist clips – “party political home” of anti-feminism

Not a particularly original insight: He made it clear there that he wanted to use social media to undermine the gatekeeper function of journalism, which ideally filters and classifies messages from right-wing extremists. Ahrens said at the time that they had “a window” into the “brains” of the predominantly young TikTok clientele. Young men in particular are a target group that EU top candidate Krah is targeting: “One in three young men has never had a girlfriend. Are you one of them? (…) Don't let anyone tell you that you have to be sweet, soft, weak and left-wing. Real men are right-wing,” he said in a TikTok clip with 1.4 million views.

Basically, Krah is using a traditional, sexist ideal of masculinity of a cold, dominant man who has a right to a woman's body. As early as 2017, the Giessen education and political scientist Juliane Lang
wrote in the anthology “AfD & FPÖ” at Nomos about the relationship between racism and anti-feminism in the party. The AfD and its frontrunners are a “party political home” for “different spectrums of organized anti-feminism”. According to Lang, “conservative to ethnic gender politics” have been the core of the party since the AfD was founded and are intertwined with racist ideas. The AfD sees women as mothers and their primary role in society is to bear children. A clearly sexist image of women.

In the person of Maximilian Krah, Catholic-conservative sexism intertwines with the anti-Semitic and racist conspiracy narrative of the “great population exchange”. Krah repeatedly spoke of “revolkung”, a neo-Nazi term that suggests a threat to the national community postulated by Krah or Ahrens through immigration as well as women's rights and the associated falling birth rates. The IB has been spreading this narrative for years. It was repeatedly found in letters of confession from right-wing extremist terrorists.

Cryptocurrency podcast with a right-wing bias or: How propaganda gets into children.

Ahrens gave further insight into how right-wing radicals find their way into the minds of young people via X: “Right-libertarian cryptobros” would be “perfect” to shift the discourse to the right. He related this to an article in star. There, a mother described how right-wing narratives and lies seeped into her son's head via the “Hoss und Hopf” podcast. In the podcast from the milieu of the right-wing libertarian cryptocurrency scene, content from the X account “Radio Genoa” was distributed. This is a well-known fake news sling; for example, it claimed that the federal government would support sea rescue of refugees in order to drive European peoples to “suicide”.

A clear echo of the “great exchange”. Like the AfD, “Hoss and Hopf” is spreading like wildfire on TikTok. They particularly attract young men with money, promises of success and a healthy dose of machismo. At the beginning of 2024, a survey by the Financial Times showed that men aged 18 to 29 are becoming increasingly “conservative”, while women of the same age are increasingly representing more “liberal” or egalitarian values. According to an analysis by the elections research group, people voted in the state elections in Hesse 17 percent of this age group supported the AfD, and the party was significantly more popular among men than among women. Ahrens answered the rhetorical question as to whether he wanted to “manipulate” young people Xby the way, with a resounding “yes”.