The far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, held its biennial conference in the eastern city of Erfurt over the weekend, making plans for state elections in the fall, against a backdrop of mass public protests in the city.
Germany is divided into 16 states, which have significant levels of devolved power over matters such as health care, education and policing. Soon, voters in three states that were all part of the former East Germany, which is now a heartland of AfD support — Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the city-state of Berlin — will have elections where the party has high hopes of success.
The AfD was founded in 2013 as a Euroskeptic party, but has now taken on board other right-wing opinions, most notably a hard line on immigration. It is perceived as being friendly to Russia, and deliberately provocative by choosing to hold its conference 100 years on from a Nazi party conference in nearby Weimar, at which the Hitler Youth movement was founded and straight-arm salute was introduced, allegations it has denied.
The Guardian newspaper quoted local police in saying that around 20,000 people turned out on Saturday to protest against the conference, which saw co-leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla re-elected, with Chrupalla calling their partnership “a successful duo the likes of which German politics has rarely seen”.
He then accused the protesters of being “against democratic decision-making… they believe they have a monopoly on democracy. To these demonstrators I say: this democracy is just as much our democracy as it is yours”, adding that being able to have a party conference was a “guaranteed right”.
Elections in February 2025 for Germany’s Parliament, the Reichstag, saw the AfD score the second-highest vote share and win the second-largest block of seats, behind the center-right alliance of the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union, or CDU/CSU. But the mainstream parties’ policy of non-cooperation with the AfD saw the CDU/CSU instead opt to work with the third-placed Social Democrats.
Victory in the upcoming state elections would be a new level of success for the AfD, and Chrupalla called on supporters to help deliver an absolute majority in Saxony-Anhalt, where a recent survey by polling company PolitPro had the party on course for a vote share of 41.4 percent, compared to the CDU/CSU’s 24.9 percent.
Such a result would, in Chrupalla’s words, “send the right signal to the democracy-haters out there who wanted to prevent our party conference”.
Weidel said the party was “ready for the responsibility” of forming a government after the country’s next general election, calling the AfD “the new people’s party in Germany”, while accusing the CDU/CSU of “pursuing policies against the German people, against Germany, against the interests of our country”.
German far-right rally sparks anger
