How Germany’s AfD Became a Political Powerhouse

 

Right-wing extremism never fully died in Germany after the Second World War, but it has taken many new forms over the course of decades. Germany today is making headlines in the political sphere thanks to its Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) party, which formed less than 15 years ago and is already a major political force—especially in the former East, which was once behind the Iron Curtain. What is different about the AfD versus the pre-reunification right-wing parties of Germany, and why is it experiencing so much more electoral success?

Fuel for Extremists? Postwar Migration to Germany

In the two decades immediately following the conclusion of World War II, Germany experienced a massive wave of emigration, one of the most significant in the country’s history. In part in an effort to counter this, Germany began a recruitment process to attract foreign workers, and migration agreements with several countries were established in the postwar years, including Italy (1955), Spain (1960), Greece (1960), and Türkiye (1961). 

The German-Turkish agreement was unique, however, in that the “ethno-political orientation of German policy was threatened, as one of its central tenets was that only Europeans would be recruited,” according to Johannes-Dieter Steinert in a 2014 Journal of Contemporary History article. In a 1974 study, W.S.G. Thomas stated that 22 percent of the foreign workforce in Germany was comprised of Turks. Postwar Germany became a migration destination for vast numbers of foreign workers, many of them considered “Gastarbeiter” (guestworkers). 

By 1975, it is estimated that more than four million foreign workers were living in Germany, up from just over 100,000 in 1957; by 1980, seven percent of Germany’s total population was foreign workers. However, in 1973, West Germany halted the recruitment of non-EEC (European Economic Community) workers which, according to Thomas, was “basically a reflection of increasing hostility by German nationals towards immigrant labour.”

Decades later, a turning point came in what is commonly referred to as the refugee crisis of 2015. While Germany had been a popular choice for foreign workers throughout the second half of the twentieth century, an unprecedented number of refugees—decidedly different from the Gastarbeiter of the Cold War years—entered Germany’s borders. 

“For a few weeks in the late summer and autumn of 2015,” Fabian Georgi states in Racism After Apartheid: Challenges for Marxism and Anti-Racism, “Europe’s borders were open like never before since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989/1990.” However, this “period of almost euphoric solidarity with refugees was short-lived.” The “long summer of migration,” as this period is sometimes called, likely “ended in mid-November 2015 when terrorist attacks in Paris enabled right-wing forces to associate refugees with ‘Islamic terrorism.’” 

A relatively new German political party at the time, the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD), founded in 2013, capitalized on the growing uneasiness and political tensions surrounding the refugee crisis to grow from a fringe party (as it still was in 2015) into a national political force (now the second-largest in the country after February 2025), using anti-immigrant rhetoric to exploit economic anxieties and cultural fears, particularly in the former East. 

Antecedents to the AfD: Pre-Unification Right-Wing Movements in Germany

While postwar Germany (especially the newly formed West Germany) remained strongly against outward nationalism and fascism, right-wing extremism still persisted in some forms. The 1960s saw the establishment of the National Democratic Party, led by right-wing extremists exploiting the “sharp economic downturn” Germany was experiencing at the time. 

The party’s executive committee consisted of 18 members; “twelve were believed to have been active Nazis during the Hitler era,” Gerard Braunthal explains in his 2009 book Right-Wing Extremism in Contemporary Germany. In 1983, former Waffen-SS sergeant Franz Schönhuber, “[a]mbivalent about the Nazi past,” founded the Republikaner party. As Braunthal states, Schönhuber “admitted that the Hitler regime brought about the country’s destruction and defeat, but he also espoused patriotism and self-sacrifice,” two qualities associated with Nazi ideology. 

According to Braunthal, the Republikaner’s 1987 platform targeted economically and socially insecure Germans, fearful of an increase in crime due to the presence of foreigners, attributing Germans’ hardships to immigration from poorer countries. The platform advocated for stricter immigration controls and was characterized by “anti-European,” “ultra-nationalist,” and “xenophobic” rhetoric. This echoes the rhetoric of the AfD today.

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