After Germany’s Elections, the AfD Could Still Have the Last Laugh

Alice Weidel may get the last laugh yet.

The co-leader of Germany’s most popular party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), was visibly amused on Tuesday morning when Friedrich Merz, the head of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), lost the first vote for the Bundestag’s next chancellorship. Never before in German history had a presumptive chancellor been rejected in an initial ballot. But 18 members of Merz’s 328-member governing coalition had bolted and cast their secret votes against him. That betrayal left Merz six votes shy of the bare majority of Bundestag seats (316 out of 630) needed to assume the chancellorship. After a hastily convened second round, Merz pushed his total up to a sufficient 325 votes (with three holdouts, still anonymous), but the damage had been done.

As Weidel wrote on X, the first ballot revealed the “weak foundation” of Merz’s coalition between his moderate Christian Democratic Union and the left-leaning Social Democrats (SPD). That coalition had been cobbled together for one purpose only: to ensure that the AfD, a strong second-place finisher in the February parliamentary elections, was kept out of government. Since those elections, the AfD’s approval ratings have only risen, and now, at 26 percent, they exceed the CDU’s 24 percent. Were new elections to be called today, as Weidel demanded after Merz’s first round loss, AfD could well end up with the most seats in parliament. And the new government’s ideological fissures, put on stark display during the chancellor voting, all but guarantee that Merz will not be able to accomplish the reforms necessary to pull Germany out of its two-year recession.

The humiliation of Merz and his shaky CDU-SPD government must have provided grim satisfaction to the AfD’s voters and leaders. Just four days earlier, on May 2, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency had declared the AfD a “right-wing extremist” organization, inimical to the “free democratic basic order” (die freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung). This declaration was just the latest of the German establishment’s efforts to discredit and disempower the AfD.

The “right-wing extremist” designation means that the domestic intelligence agency, known as the Office of the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV), will have even greater latitude than before to wiretap party members, infiltrate the organization, and investigate its finances. Moves are already afoot, following the BfV ruling, to forbid AfD members from serving in government jobs, including as police, teachers, and civil servants. Party members currently employed in law enforcement may be required to repudiate any right-wing sympathies. Cutting off public funding is under consideration, and the ever-present hope among Germany’s political elites to ban the party entirely has gained new momentum.

What has the AfD done to merit the BfV’s unprecedented excommunication of a nationally represented party? Has it been plotting a coup? Defying the norms of parliamentary democracy? Violating court rulings? Engaging in violence? Fomenting rebellion?

No. To the contrary, its leaders have dutifully acceded to novel procedural maneuvers designed to deny them committee chairmanships and other democratically earned parliamentary privileges; they have obeyed judicial decrees shutting them out of power; they have submitted bills and voted on legislation using the same protocols as other members of Parliament. They have run campaigns exploiting the same tools of modern communications as have their rivals—and nothing more than those tools. Their rallies are peaceful and make no effort to summon the anarchic furies of political retribution— unlike, arguably, the incendiary rhetoric of their foes.

So wherein lies the AfD’s crimes against the “central fundamental principles of the constitution?”

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, this alleged defender of Germany’s “free democratic basic order,” has not deigned to publish the 1,100-page secret dossier on which its judgment rests. The public cannot evaluate the BfV’s decision. The AfD cannot respond to or defend itself against the agency’s indictment.

But the BfV’s press release makes clear that the AfD’s sins are purely conceptual: It rejects what would appear to be contemporary Germany’s most fundamental value—demographic replacement. In calling for an end to mass migration—the AfD’s central tenet—party leaders notice things that one is not allowed to notice in Germany today and hold views about nationhood that one is not allowed to hold.

The AfD has had the temerity, reports the BfV, to use terms like Messermigranten [knife migrants], presumably in reference to the long train of knife attacks by Muslim immigrants. (As long as it was at it, the AfD might as well have also coined the phrase, Menschenmengerammende Migranten [crowd-ramming migrants], in reference to terrorist vehicle rampages in Christmas markets and elsewhere.)

After the BfV’s announcement, Germany’s media, barely tamping down their elation, rushed to fill out the details of what the BfV calls AfD’s “xenophobic, anti-minority, anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim statements.” (Apparently, postcolonial studies has reached even the denizens of Germany’s sprawling government bureaucracies.)

A favorite video clip making the rounds on ZDF, a large public TV broadcaster, shows Weidel telling two women: “These phenomena, people walking around armed with knives, the rapes, are completely new in our country. . . . We are experiencing Jihad on our streets.”

Hyperbole is now apparently a political crime. Of course, knifings and rapes occurred before mass migration into Germany. But the scale of post-mass-migration violent crime is unique. Germany never experienced mass sexual assault before the New Year’s celebrations in 2015. From 2019 to 2023, asylum seekers, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, have sexually assaulted more than 52,000 females. In 2023, Germany saw 761 group rapes. Half of the suspects were foreign nationals; others were of immigrant parentage. There were nearly 40 knife attacks a day in 2023, with non-Germans six times more likely to be the assailant than Germans. In 2023, foreigners committed 41 percent of all crimes in Germany, though they were about 15 percent of the population.

To notice such a disparity in criminal offending, as some AfD leaders do, promotes “irrational fears,” according to the BfV, and thus is not allowed. Never mind that the disparities are real.

The BfV accuses the AfD of proposing an “ethnoculturally determined propensity towards violence.” That is a scary-sounding phrase that repackages empirical description as forbidden racial determinism. The media have also resurfaced statements at AfD rallies to the effect that being German means more than having a certificate of residency in your hand. This observation would be uncontroversial referring to any non-Western culture. “Being African means a lived connection to the ancestors, to tribal customs, to the cycles of the land, to origin myths, to drum languages, to communal norms”—such a truism would not be denounced as xenophobic or antiwhite. But to say that being German means a lived connection to Bach, Beethoven, Mendelsohn, Schumann, and Brahms, to Ländler and Volksmusik, to Schiller, Goethe, Kant, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, and Thomas Mann, to Albrecht Dürer and Tilman Riemenschneider, to the Nibelungen myths and the Brothers Grimm, to the Rhine and the Danube, to Heidelberg and Tübingen—to say that is racist.

An AfD politician decried the “100,000-fold import of people from deeply backward and misogynistic cultures”—further ground for banishment, per the press. It is appropriate to call an American college campus “misogynistic” because co-eds get drunk and participate in regretted hook-ups. Afterward, those sobered-up co-eds will be accorded a Star Chamber prosecution against their “rapist,” overseen by an overwhelmingly female bureaucracy. Yet those co-eds still suffer under a “misogynistic” culture, according to elite opinion. By contrast, it is racist to characterize a non-Western society that practices genital mutilation and denies females higher education as “misogynistic.”

The BfV accuses the AfD of aiming to “exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society . . . and thus assign them a legally devalued status.” That is not true. The AfD merely seeks to enforce what little remains of Germany’s rules against illegal entry and to withhold from failed asylum seekers the German welfare state’s cornucopia of goodies, including free housing and cash. (Several of Germany’s recent terror attackers took full advantage of that benefits bonanza while planning their rampages.)

The day after the BfV secret dossier dropped, ZDF anchor Marietta Slomka sought to elucidate the ties between the AfD and National Socialism, with an eye to leveraging the “right-wing extremist” label into a ban on the AfD. Slomka is the public broadcaster’s most tightly-wound scourge of fascists everywhere, especially those now leading the U.S.

She began her segment by noting that the AfD was doing what it always does: play the victim. “Playing the victim” apparently means objecting to a secret process that punishes a party for political speech. Slomka asked a “violence and conflict researcher” at the University of Bielefeld whether the AfD seeks to replace constitutional government with National Socialism. Professor Andreas Zick noted several promising signs. An AfD leader (that would be Weidel, in her January 2025 X interview with Elon Musk) had called Hitler a “man of the left,” Zick said. Never mind that Weidel was asserting the lack of harmony between the AfD and Hitler; to Zick, she was trivializing Hitler as a prelude to a full-out embrace of National Socialism.

Zick also suggested that AfD’s “hate” campaigns were stepping stones to the violent overthrow of constitutional government. In fact, the AfD is the most anti-Nazi of Germany’s parties. It is the most pro-Israel and philo-Semitic. It has long sought to protect Israel from the anti-Semites on the U.N.’s various aid agencies and governing boards, including the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Its efforts to cut foreign aid to anti-Israel organizations received no support from the establishment.

It is the establishment’s lax migration policies that fuel Germany’s new anti-Semitism, visible in every mass of Muslim demonstrators chanting pro-Hamas slogans and waving Palestinian flags on the streets of Berlin, Cologne, and Hamburg. But the establishment still pretends that the anti-Jewish threat in Germany comes from the alleged white-supremacist followers of the AfD.

The AfD rejects imperial conquest, German involvement in foreign wars, and the cult of green energy with its echoes of Hitlerian nature myths. It opposes a state-planned economy and restrictions on speech and the press.

True, a handful of its representatives have violated the taboo against suggesting that the Holocaust is not the sum total of German history. Breaking that taboo is not the same as yearning for a return of the Third Reich.

A former AfD official, Alexander Gauland, called in 2018 for acknowledging Germany’s twentieth-century genocidal sins (as if there were any risk of not doing so today). “We accept our responsibility for the 12 years” of Hitler’s reign, he told young AfD members. But Gauland went on to say the unsayable: “We have a glorious history —and that, dear friends, lasted longer than the damn 12 years. . . . Hitler and the Nazis are just bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”

Whether or not one believes that such contextualization should remain forever out of bounds, Gauland was not normalizing Hitler’s crimes against humanity. Yet that is how his remarks, denuded of everything but the “bird poop” comparison, are being replayed today in the wake of the AfD “enemy of the constitution” designation.

The AfD is not neo-Nazi; it is not a threat to the democratic order. Its constitutional crimes come down to this: a belief that a nation has the right to decide whether it wants to change its historic character through mass Third World migration.

Such change is the whole point of multiculturalism. If immigrants were expected to assimilate fully into the receiving culture, they would lose their value. They are supposed to bring lasting difference to Western nations and to shake the majority culture out of its traditions and identity, replacing the latter with desperately needed diversity (Germany’s much-touted Vielfalt).

The elite establishment never claims that the non-West needs comparably transformative diversity. No one argues that Sub-Saharan Africa or the Muslim Middle East should import millions of Danes and Irish to counter racial, ethnic, and religious homogeneity. Only the West engineers its own demographic replacement out of a belief in its own illegitimacy.

The AfD opposes that replacement out of a love for German heritage and a belief that the German culture is as unique and as worthy of preservation as any non-Western culture. For that belief, it must be crushed and its voters denied their rightful representation in Parliament. This exclusionary cartel is the real democratic coup, not anything that the AfD has ever proposed.

As the AfD began its inexorable rise in popular support since its founding in 2012, Germany’s other parties pledged to maintain a “fire wall” to keep it out of governing coalitions and ministerial jobs. The shunning was reinforced by assaults against party members and party property, including with feces and Molotov cocktails. The press erected its own firewall against the AfD; party leaders are spectral presences on the airwaves, granted brief snippets of air time only when circumstances utterly require it.

Nevertheless, as the public’s fury against immigrant violence and immigrant welfare dependency rose in 2024 and early 2025, Merz took a step widely characterized as breaching the hygienic barrier protecting the right-thinking against contamination. Before the February parliamentary elections, he introduced a non-binding resolution into the Bundestag regarding mass migration that was likely to garner AfD support and that could only pass with AfD support. The uproar over this infraction had its intended effect. Merz poured out soul-cleansing anathema against the AfD a day later and foreswore any cooperation with the party should he be elected chancellor.

Even then, the CDU made one more fleeting gesture toward democratic governance after the February election. Then-deputy leader of the CDU, Jens Spahn, floated the idea of treating the AfD like “any other opposition party” and allowing it the committee chairmanships that its vote totals should guarantee it. Another frenzied backlash ensued. Now Spahn, elevated to the CDU’s chairmanship in the new parliament, is reported to have told his parliamentary colleagues that the CDU will have nothing to do with the AfD.

The debacle of Merz’s first day as chancellor reveals just how disastrous that fortified fire wall will be. The cordon sanitaire around the AfD necessitated an alliance with the anti-conservative SPD, even though voters had roundly repudiated the party in the most recent election. During the campaign, Merz had promised to defend Germany’s famous debt-brake, which forbids high levels of government debt. He would finance increased miliary spending by cutting welfare payments and government bureaucracy, he said. His would-be coalition partners revolted against such “austerity” measures, and Merz lifted the debt brake while keeping welfare services and the size of officialdom intact.

For good measure, Merz promised a slew of additional climate change “investments”—read: subsidies to non-competitive green energy concerns that have no capacity to meet Germany’s energy needs.

And so it will continue. The CDU’s SPD partners will block real reform of Germany’s suicidal climate policies, which have driven the German economy into recession. Any effective restrictions on demographic replacement will run up against the charge that the CDU is simply AfD-lite, especially after the BfV ruling.

The SPD’s committee chairs are young and disproportionately female, with the predictable political consequences. Naturally, German media have been raving about this SPD gynocracy, after having blasted the AfD for sending “only” 12 percent female representatives to Parliament in the February 2025 elections. Good for the AfD, one might say. Or, one could point out that the AfD’s prominent co-chair and its deputy leader are both female.

The Merz government’s new Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Reem Alabali-Radovan (SPD), served previously as the federal commissioner for integration and antiracism. Do not expect her support for a rollback of legal migration or for the deportation of illegal migrants.

The CDU and the AfD’s positions on downsizing government, freeing up private enterprise, and strengthening Germany’s borders, while not identical in sweep, make the two parties natural partners (despite differences on Ukraine), unlike the shotgun marriage between the CDU and the SPD. That forced union will make for a miserable coexistence if the coalition does not crack up sooner rather than later. The government’s new Justice Minister, Stefanie Hubig (SPD), told ZDF on Tuesday that the government’s first order of business would be responding to the “right-wing extremist” designation of the AfD. So much for jumpstarting the economy.

The AfD sued the BfV on Monday for violating the German constitution. It was the spy agency that had delivered a “blow to German democracy” and to “freedom of expression,” it said.

Alice Weidel alleged that the BfV had been “instrumentalized for party politics,” and that the shunning announcement had been timed to coincide with the change of administration. Outgoing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) denied any political interference with the BfV judgment and its rollout. She could be telling the truth. No explicit political interference is needed; the BfV is part of the establishment, simply doing what that establishment is primed to do: keep the AfD out of legitimately earned power.

Members of the Trump administration immediately identified the significance of the BfV’s malediction upon the AfD. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X last Friday: “Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy—it’s tyranny in disguise . . . What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD—which took second in the recent election—but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes. Germany should reverse course.”

Vice President J. D. Vance followed up: “The AfD is the most popular party in Germany,” he wrote, but bureaucrats were trying to destroy it. “The West tore down the Berlin Wall together. And it has been rebuilt—not by the Soviets or the Russians, but by the German establishment.”

Sneered Marietta Slomka through clenched teeth: Isn’t it interesting that the AfD’s strongest allies are the U.S. and Russia? Germany’s foreign office also shot back: “This is democracy,” it wrote on Rubio’s X account. “We have learnt from our history that right-wing extremism needs to be stopped.”

Across the West, citizens are rebelling against demographic replacement. A battle is under way between their will and the will of the elites. If Germany’s leaders continue to tell a quarter of the German population—decent, law-abiding individuals—that they are at best Hitler-adjacent and at worst Hitler-worshippers for wanting Germany’s cultural identity preserved, if those leaders continue to suppress voices and votes, either there will be a massive upset in the halls of power and the people will be liberated, or the mechanisms of repression will grow more sweeping.

Americans should hope for the former course.

Top Photo: Alice Weidel, co-leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), at an election party in February (Soren Stache - Pool/Getty Images)