Introduction

In the context of postwar Europe, Germany was long an exception (Decker and Hartleb 2006). Unlike in neighbouring France, Austria, Denmark, or Poland, for example, in Germany, until fairly recently, populist parties and movements did not play a major role. Only with the emergence of the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) did populism become a significant political force in German politics. Founded on 6 February 2013, the party only narrowly missed the 5 per cent threshold needed to enter parliament in the September 2013 federal elections. Within the next 12 months, it successfully contested the elections for the European parliament and in the East German states of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia.

The AfD's first leader, Bernd Lucke, was a professor of economics who pursued a neoliberal political agenda and advocated for Germany to leave the Eurozone. While the economic policies of Lucke and other AfD founders attracted many followers in the wake of the Greek sovereign debt crisis, the AfD's meteoric rise between 2013 and 2019 was largely due to its ability to gain the support of voters dissatisfied with official attempts to value cultural diversity and with Germany's asylum and immigration policies, particularly the Merkel government's decision in 2015 to not close Germany's borders and to admit more than a million asylum seekers over a two-year period. In the 2017 federal elections, the AfD won 12.6 per cent of the votes and became the third-largest party in the Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament. Although immigration did not feature prominently in the next federal election campaign, in September 2021 the AfD was largely able to consolidate its position; in Saxony and Thuringia, it finished ahead of all other parties.

In terms of its elected representatives, its members, and its voters, the AfD has included and appealed to a wide range of people, from social conservatives at one end of the spectrum to sympathizers of the New Right at the other. The AfD's heterogeneity has been a strength because it has broadened the party's appeal, but it has also been a weakness because the AfD has always been riven by factional conflicts.