A right-wing/far-right party gains a foothold in the Bundestag for the first time
Founded in 2013 to articulate a mixture of Euroscepticism and economic liberalism, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) narrowly failed to win any seats in the Bundestag elections of that year. Internal disputes and changes of leadership caused the party to move significantly to the right. Although some AfD politicians continued to advocate moderate policies, the party repeatedly made headlines with a range of increasingly extreme positions that, according to several court rulings, permitted the description “fascist”. This did not deter many voters, however, and the AfD gained increasing levels of support. The federal election of 24 September 2017 saw the party enter the German parliament for the first time as the third-strongest party with more than 12% of the vote. Following a slight decline in votes in the 2021 elections, the AfD doubled its result in the February 2025 federal election to more than 20% of the vote and became the second-largest party in parliament.
Post-war Germany had never experienced a prolonged period of widespread support for a party well to the right of the political spectrum. According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, significant sections of the AfD hold völkisch-nationalist views or attitudes towards migration that are incompatible with the Basic Law. For this reason, the AfD was classified as a “suspected right-wing extremist organization” in 2021, and lawsuits against this classification failed in court. In May 2025, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the entire party as a “confirmed right-wing extremist organization”, a decision that was later suspended pending a court ruling.
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