How to beat Germany’s AfD in 2025
Posted by Thomas Klikauer
With the most recent election results in – this time from Germany’s most populous state, Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW) – the country’s most neo-fascist party, the AfD, received exactly: “nothing”.
Not a single candidate was elected in late September in local, municipal, and city elections. Zero wins in what is often called Germany’s most populist state.
While the neo-fascist AfD struggles in West-Germany, East-Germany paints a very different picture. There, the AfD goes from success to success. But it’s worth remembering: the entire population of East Germany is smaller than that of Bavaria.
On top of that, the AfD’s failure in NRW happened in a state of 18 million people. In short: the AfD performs well where it doesn’t count for much – and fails where it matters a lot.
At least in the West, the AfD’s right-wing messaging doesn’t seem to stick. And yet, across the country, the AfD is still climbing in the polls – albeit marginally. In Germany’s most well-known poll, the Sonntagsfrage, the AfD currently sits at around 25% to 26%, neck and neck with the conservative CDU.
The message is clear: if Germany’s democratic parties want to win voters back, they must act more strategically – without falling into the AfD’s propaganda trap by adopting its singular obsession: migration.
Even at a recent AfD rally in Magdeburg, East-Germany, it became clear that some people currently leaning toward the AfD are still reachable.
Germany’s democratic parties can still convince some – though by no means all – AfD voters to return to the democratic fold. This is not a hopeless task.
Still, over the coming years, attracting larger numbers of AfD voters back may prove difficult.
The AfD appears to have cemented a die-hard bloc of up to 20% – voters locked into far-right echo chambers where AfD propaganda circulates 24/7. These are the unreachables.
Long term, though, returning some of them to the democratic camp is both possible and necessary. A recent longitudinal survey of 12,000 people – ongoing since 2021 – shows that change is slow.
In short: it took years to asphyxiate voters inside the anti-democratic bloc, and it will take years to pull even some of them back out.
One of the main drivers for AfD support – alongside the rejection, or even hatred, of migration – is deep distrust in democratic institutions and parties. This sentiment is especially pronounced in East-Germany.
AfD voters have convinced themselves that democratic parties don’t want anything good – not for them, not for Germany.
Every statement, action, policy, plan, and decision from mainstream parties is filtered through a lens of hostility and suspicion.
It’s the classic “them vs. us” narrative – a simplistic worldview for a simplified mindset.
Most, if not all, mainstream media outlets are no longer trusted by AfD supporters. This is crucial: it isolates AfD voters from the rest of society, while opening the floodgates to far-right propaganda and neo-fascist filter bubbles.
Still, there are ways to reach some of them – but Germany’s democratic parties aren’t using the right channels.
Just as Hitler’s Nazis needed the Volksempfänger radio and propaganda papers like Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter, today’s far-right extremists rely on their own digital propaganda outlets to bypass mainstream media. Their weapon is the internet.
These are the online platforms of the New Right, spinning every issue to the detriment of democratic parties.
So, Germany’s democratic parties – the CDU, the Left, the SPD, the Greens, and the FDP – must engage directly through social media and alternative digital platforms.
This is a communication strategy. Recently, Germany’s Left Party (Die Linke) has made headway with this, successfully reaching young voters – and there’s still potential here.
Meanwhile, the AfD and its far-right platforms frame everything other parties do in a way that allows the AfD to present itself either as the victim or as the only alternative. And they’re succeeding. Many voters are buying it.
The current government under Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) has, in recent months, adopted hardline anti-migration policies in an attempt to undercut the AfD. It backfired.
The AfD’s poll numbers have only risen further – now matching the CDU nationally at over 25%. The strategy failed, completely.
It was doomed from the start. By echoing the AfD’s rhetoric on migration, the CDU legitimized the AfD’s core issue and inflated its perceived importance. It created the false impression that migration is Germany’s most pressing issue. It is not. Climate change, for example, is far more urgent.
Adopting right-wing themes doesn’t neutralize the far right – it emboldens them. This has been proven repeatedly. It’s not how you win back voters from populist parties.
Instead, it normalizes their narratives, amplifies their conspiracy theories, and leaves the AfD looking “authentic” – the real voice on migration. This doesn’t weaken the far right – it strengthens it.
We’ve seen the same pattern across Europe: when center-right parties drift rightward, it typically benefits the far-right parties – not the democracy centre. Media theory and political reality agree.
The CDU needs a new strategy. Co-opting the AfD’s racism has not worked. AfD poll numbers keep rising.
Yet it’s important to remember: over 70% of the German population remains clearly opposed to the AfD. This limits the party’s realistic potential to around 20%.
But the size of the AfD’s parliamentary group – and the public funding that comes with it – depends heavily on voter turnout and the 5% electoral threshold required to enter the Bundestag.
At the same time – and not coincidentally – anti-migration, racist, and xenophobic attitudes have grown stronger in recent years. This is due in no small part to AfD propaganda, often echoed by mainstream and conservative media.
That means we cannot rule out the possibility that more voters will drift away from democratic parties in the future.
In a recent electoral poll in the East-German state of Saxony-Anhalt, an astonishing 39% supported the far right.
Worse, if several smaller parties fail to clear the 5% hurdle and are shut out of the state parliament, the AfD wouldn’t even need 50% to govern alone.
There are roughly 330 days until the election that could turn the first German state – to use Nazi-era language – into a Gau. A state with a new premier who might well fashion himself as a Gauleiter.
That alone should be enough to wake up some AfD-leaning voters and convince them to return to the democratic spectrum. Many are still reachable.
To convince them, don’t write them off. Stay in dialogue. But the hard core of AfD voters – those no longer open to dialogue – likely won’t be convinced before the next state election on 6 September 2026.
Photo: (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FCK_AFD-Sticker_in_Hof_20200307_05.jpg)
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