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.

Germany post-reunification saw a new surge of right-wing extremism, though now in the East it was complicated by the political unity with the West. Gideon Botsch, in his 2012 article “From Skinhead-Subculture to Radical Right Movement: The Development of a ‘National Opposition’ in East Germany,” states that as the regime in the East collapsed in 1989 and into 1990, “it became clear that an extreme right movement had already developed in East Germany,” even though communist rule had dominated here for decades. Although isolated groups in East Germany admired Hitler and idealized Nazism, Botsch explains, they were actively suppressed by the state through the 1980s and ultimately never formed an organized national opposition. However, it seems that a significant far-right presence persisted throughout the regime’s existence. By 1990, before reunification was completed, the extreme right “subculture had not yet evolved into a political movement,” Botsch observes. Interestingly, Botsch argues that in the reunited Germany, the “East German scene became part of a ‘national opposition’ covering the whole country.” In other words, he argues that the East German far-right scene played a significant role in the broader far-right movement after Germany’s reunification, suggesting that post-reunification extremism was influenced by the far-right elements that existed in East Germany before and during reunification.

The Rise of the AfD After 2015

A 2020 article by Christiane Lemke in German Politics & Society highlights how, until 2017, “Germany seemed to be a special case among European democracies since no party on the far right won a sufficient number of votes to gain national representation in the German parliament.” She attributes this to Germany’s collective memory of its “unique and devastating” authoritarian past “provided for strict limitations pertaining to right-wing and extremist groups.” However, the “advent of the AfD,” Lemke argues, “changed German exceptionalism.”

Lemke observes that the “surge of migration after 2015 and the far right’s resentment toward immigrants and refugees in general fueled a rhetoric that is both nationalist and anti-EU.” The fact that the majority of these refugees were Muslim intensified the far right anti-immigrant rhetoric even more; Lemke maintains that the AfD strongly opposes Muslim immigration to Europe and supports the building of a ‘Fortress Europe,’” a term that originates from World War II but has more recently been employed to, in terms of the refugee crisis, refer to the “tightening of borders across the bloc,” according to Georgi Gotev. In other words, the AfD voiced its desire to “clos[e] borders against immigration and “reserv[e]” the country for only Germans and their offspring,” Lemke explains. By 2019, leading up to the European parliamentary elections, the party intensified its framing of all migrants as a “potential security threat,” and claimed that immigrants posed a “danger to women and children.” Thomas Klikauer, in a 2019 article titled “German Neo-Nazis and a New Party,” argues that over time, the AfD “has moved more and more toward neo-Nazism,” ultimately becoming “racist, nationalistic, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic.” He explains how many within the AfD hold the belief that there exists a “secret plan to breed out Germans by allowing millions of Islamic refugees and migrants into Germany.”

Frank Decker, in 2016’s “The ‘Alternative for Germany’: Factors Behind its Emergence and Profile of a New Right-wing Populist Party,” claims that the refugee crisis “proved to be an unexpected gift for the AfD. Whereas infighting caused its polling numbers to plunge throughout the first half of 2015,” the crisis actually “catapulted it to previously unseen heights.” On the topic of refugees posing a national security threat, Decker remarks that the “Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris as well as the sexual assaults perpetrated mainly by North Africans on New Year’s Eve in Cologne” in 2015 “also played into the party’s hands.” Decker says that the party developed into a “mouthpiece and almost sole medium of protest” for the section of the German population feeling “deeply unsettled by uncontrolled migrant streams.”

These feelings translated directly into support for the AfD after 2015, particularly in the former East. As Robert Grimm stated in 2015, the AfD is “Germany’s first Eurosceptic party to attract substantial electoral support in local, national and European elections.” For comparison, in Germany’s 2013 general election, the AfD captured 4.7 percent of the vote, just missing the cutoff to enter the Bundestag. In the February 2025 snap election, which featured the highest voter turnout since unification, just over 20 percent of the vote went to the AfD, rendering it the second-most popular party in the country. Important to note is its particular success in the East; the September 2024 state elections in both Saxony and Thuringia “deliver[ed] the strongest-ever turnout for an extreme right-wing party in the postwar era.” The AfD captured 31 percent of the vote in Saxony (second place behind the Christian Democrats), while it came out on top in Thuringia with 33 percent of the vote; in Thuringia, the AfD is led by “outspoken neo-fascist” Björn Höcke. Interesting as well is that a new populist party, a “rightist offshoot of the Left Party,” Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, which holds anti-immigrant sentiments and “pro-Russian sympathies,” took third in both states.

Looking Ahead

It can be argued that while the AfD is not a direct descendant of the postwar, pre-reunification right-wing parties of Germany, it shares many similarities in ideology with these earlier movements; it has simply made this ideology mainstream in a way that previous parties had not. The AfD found its voice and skyrocketed in popularity following the refugee crisis of 2015, just two years after the party’s establishment, taking advantage of a highly contentious moment in a way that earlier parties never had the chance to do. The AfD morphed from a fringe party into the second-most popular party in the country in just over a decade, and is the first far-right party in Germany to achieve such significant success in the postwar era.

In May, the AfD was officially classified as a “right-wing extremist group” by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, its domestic intelligence agency. This decision marks the first occasion “in modern German history that the party with nationwide representation in parliament has been formally designated as extremist,” though the state-level branches of the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia have already been labeled as such. This designation would be considered significant in any country; however, it is particularly colossal in Germany due to its uniquely tragic history of right-wing extremism.