Parties: Ten years AfD – “Come to stay”

Has the AfD “past its peak”? Is the “spook” over soon? Such hopes have often been expressed in other parties in the past. The AfD is now celebrating its tenth anniversary, sits in almost all state parliaments and in the Bundestag and neither polls nor election results indicate that it will disappear again in the foreseeable future.

The former “Professors’ Party”, which is now being observed by the domestic secret service as a suspected case of right-wing extremism, has established itself in the German party system and, according to experts, will remain so for the long term.

Exactly ten years ago, on February 6, 2013, a small group of less than 20 people led by economics professor Bernd Lucke and conservative publicist Konrad Adam met in a community hall in Oberursel im Taunus. Less than ten kilometers away from the location of the AfD founding meeting, around 300 party members want to celebrate the anniversary this Monday in Königstein. Unions and associations have called for a counter-demo in the small spa town.

Key issue of the refugee crisis

At the time, the AfD founders were looking for a counter-program – an “alternative” – ​​to the euro rescue policy. However, the AfD found its core issue, only temporarily superseded by corona, inflation or the energy crisis, in the wake of the refugee crisis in 2015. “Islamist terrorist attacks, which, after Paris, Brussels and Nice, also reached the German capital Berlin in December 2016, and the attacks on women on New Year’s Eve 2015/2016 in Cologne, mainly by Maghreb migrants, played into her hands,” analyzes the political scientist from Bonn AfD expert Frank Decker in an article for the Federal Agency for Civic Education.

Experts and former party members agree that the AfD has gradually shifted to the right over the years, with increasing focus on the issue of migration and changes in its membership. None of the three founding chairmen Bernd Lucke, Konrad Adam and Frauke Petry are still with us. After Lucke, many members who were assigned to the economically liberal wing also left the party.

Adam justified his resignation a good two years ago by saying that he no longer sees a future for the AfD as a “bourgeois-conservative” force. The influence of the right wing has grown steadily. Adam now said on Deutschlandfunk that he did not regret having founded the AfD, but regretted what had become of it.

Lucke, who teaches and researches as a professor of economics at the University of Hamburg, currently no longer wants to give interviews on the AfD chapter. In a “Zeit” interview in 2019, when asked whether he would have founded the party in 2013 if he had known what would become of it, he replied: “No. Definitely no.” The AfD described Lucke as “a latently xenophobic, German-nationalist party with right-wing elements.” Therefore, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution should “rather observe parts of the party than perhaps cause harm”.

Observed by domestic intelligence

In the meantime, the domestic secret service is no longer just observing individual state associations, but the AfD as a whole as a suspected right-wing extremist. He sees sufficient evidence of anti-constitutional efforts within the party. “We hardly notice any more forces trying to force extremist tendencies out of the party,” said Thomas Haldenwang, head of the agency, in December.

Observing means that the secret service can, under certain conditions, monitor AfD communications or use undercover agents and other intelligence tools. The party takes legal action against this. A decision by the Higher Administrative Court of North Rhine-Westphalia is expected in the second half of the year.

In conversations with active AfD politicians, they dismiss the subject of protection of the constitution and terms such as “right-wing extremist” or “right-wing extremist”. Co-party leader Alice Weidel speaks of abuse by the secret service to discredit the AfD as political competition. “There is nothing radical about us at all. My views have not changed in any way since Helmut Kohl’s time,” says Bernd Baumann, the first parliamentary secretary of the parliamentary group. He used to vote for the CDU, but it was “moving more and more to the left”.

10 to 15 percent

He and other leading party members are not worried about the future. “We are part of a powerful global counter-movement to the left-green mainstream. You can’t get us down from the 10 to 15 percent share of voters,” explains Baumann. 15 percent is more than just a protest party, emphasizes defense policy spokesman and former Bundeswehr officer Rüdiger Lucassen. “There would have to be a very fundamental change in policy among the old parties, but I don’t see that we would become superfluous,” replies party deputy Peter Boehringer when asked about the future of the AfD.

Political scientist Frank Decker also gives little hope to those who believe that the “spook” could be over at some point. “The AfD came to stay and it will stay,” he is convinced. In the medium term, Decker sees them in elections in the West in the double digits. In the East, “the popularity is likely to remain more than twice as high”.

Among other things, the AfD benefits from the fact that it does not occupy or take on topics and positions that are not represented or represented enough by other parties, for example on immigration or climate protection. “Both topics will continue to shape the agenda in the years to come.”