Alternative for Germany, initially a eurosceptic formation, now welcomes ultranationalists, populists and xenophobes
In just a decade, the controversial Alternative for Germany (AfD) has undergone a total transformation that, from a Eurosceptic formation, has led it to become an ultranationalist, anti-Semitic, populist and xenophobic party. “They gave us up for dead in just two or three years, but our success continues,” declared its president, Tino Chrupalla, on Monday, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the most radical party, but also the most isolated, in the German political spectrum. Proof of the ideological shift towards neo-Nazism is the fact that of the 18 AfD founders who founded the party ten years ago in the small town of Oberusel, in the central state of Hesse, 13 have left in the meantime, two have died and only 3 are still affiliated. The parents of Alternative for Germany were mostly professors, politicians and economic experts critical of the policies of the European Union and its headquarters in Brussels.
«We founded the party in 2013 because the European Union wanted to break the Lisbon Treaties. Because the euro was introduced under the wrong conditions and with the intention of making an electoral offer to those who were dissatisfied with the federal government’s measures to rescue the single currency”, explains Markus Keller, grandson of a Jew murdered in the camp Nazi extermination of Auschwitz, who left the AfD years ago due to the “unbearable” ideological drift of the party. Asked if he would found Alternative for Germany again, the former first treasurer of the formation, Norbert Stenzel, answers today that “in no way. What’s more, now it poses a threat to democracy and that is the most unfortunate thing. And its first president, the professor of Economics at the University of Hamburg, Bernd Lucke, has not even wanted to make statements for the round anniversary of its creation. “I’m sorry for what it’s become,” he said laconically in an interview five years ago.
Lucke was the first leader of the Alternative for Germany who lived in his own flesh, which led to the massive infiltration of his formation by far-right elements. During the 2015 federal congress in Essen, just two years after its creation, he lost the power struggle and was ousted from the presidency by Frauke Petry, an ambitious politician from the moderate wing, who was also swallowed up by the far-right AfD. in 2017. Jörg Meuthen, his successor at the head of the party, succumbed in 2022. Three presidents in nine years who threw in the towel and left the Alternative for Germany when they found themselves surpassed by the most radical wing. Despite this, the AfD appears solid in the electoral polls. The Politbarometer, the political barometer of the ZDF public television channel, gave them 15% of the vote in a nationwide poll at the end of January. They are five points more than in the autumn 2021 general elections. Fear of inflation, high energy prices and the war in Ukraine have once again given wings to a formation that won voters during the refugee crisis in 2015 and 2016.
However, they continue to be marginalized by the rest of the political forces. All parties with parliamentary representation in the Bundestag respect the pact not to support or ally with Alternative for Germany at national, regional or local level. Despite everything, its current leader in the German lower house, Alice Weidel, is optimistic about future elections. Particularly strong in the east of the country, in the territory of the extinct German Democratic Republic, the AfD hopes to succeed in Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia in 2024. “It is something strategically relevant, since we aim for the first time to assume responsibility for government in a East German state,” Weidel said in a recent interview. A dream that will hardly come true. If necessary, the rest of the parties, conservatives, social democrats, liberals, greens and the Left, will form coalitions that avoid the constitution of an extreme right-wing executive.
The best-known face among the right-wing extremists of the AfD is undoubtedly Björn Höcke, president of the party in the state of Thuringia. In 2017 he called the Holocaust Memorial in the heart of Berlin a “monument of shame.” This and other statements in the same tone that minimize the crimes of Nazism have earned him permanent observation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s internal intelligence services. Those who have abandoned the formation frightened by this type of nonsense calculate that 40% of the affiliates are far-right, neo-Nazis or “Reichsbürger”, the so-called citizens of the Reich who deny the existence of the Federal Republic and defend the legality of the imperial era, more than a century ago. And although it has been repeatedly stated that it is an ephemeral party, the truth is that Alternative for Germany has established itself on the German political scene. Its current leaders, Chrupalla and Weidel, see this as a “considerable success” and hope that their formation will continue to reap triumphs thanks to the dissatisfied and the protest vote.
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