Founded in 2013 to defend the release of the single currency, the alternative party for Germany has been transformed over the years. Firmly implanted, he hopes to be able to impose himself in government coalitions during the 2024 elections in Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia.
by Thomas Wieder (Berlin, correspondent)
It was February 6, 2013. That day, in a parish hall of Oberursel, a posh commune around Frankfurt, eighteen men angry with Angela Merkel’s policy in the face of the crisis of the Euro zone founded a new political party, an alternative for Germany (AFD). Their main claim: the end of the single currency and the return to Deutschemark.
Monday, February 6, it is 8 kilometers away, in the village hall of the small town of Königstein, that AFD celebrated its tenth anniversary. From his eighteen founding fathers, only one was present, two having died, two having declined the invitation, the thirteen others having in the meantime left a party in which they no longer recognized themselves.
In ten years, AFD has indeed changed a lot. First ideologically, the original fight against the euro having given way to other battles: against the reception of refugees during the migration crisis of 2015-2016, against masks and vaccines during the pandemic of covid- 19 and, since February 24, 2022, against the sanctions imposed on Russia and against all help in Ukraine.
Sociologically too, AFD has transformed. The “teachers’ party”, a nickname given to him at his beginnings due to the large number of economists, jurists and essayists sitting in his governing bodies, has expanded his breeding ground. Originally drawing from the conservative and bourgeois circles of the west of the country, he today records his best scores in the former East Germany, where he has become a pole of attraction for little graduate citizens and angry with the “old parties of the system”, to use an expression dear to its leaders.
79 deputies
Ten years after its foundation, AFD is solidly rooted in the German political landscape. In the Bundestag, where he sits on the far right, he has 79 deputies, twice as much as the far left party Die Linke. On a Länder scale, it is represented in all regional parliaments, except that of Schleswig-Holstein, in the north of the country.
If he has made a place as an opposition force, AFD has not become a party of government. It is now his ambition. “We don’t just want to be heard, we want to pass our ideas and we want to govern,” said Alice Weidel, the party co -president on Monday in Königstein. “In the near future, we will govern, first in one of the East Länder, then in the west of the country, and finally at the national level,” bidd Tino Chrupalla, his alter ego.
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