This article was originally published in May 2025, in issue #1 of International Marxism, international political journal of International Socialist Alternative. Click here to buy/subscribe.
The extreme right AfD (“Alternative for Germany”) party received 20.8% of the vote in the general elections in February. Opinion polls a month later saw them rising to 23% support while the conservative CDU (“Christian Democratic Union of Germany”), which won the general election in February with 28.5%, is down to 27% support in the polls. The AfD has increased its vote share in every election since 2013. At the same time, they went sharply to the right, from a conservative, anti-EU position to a fierce racist party with fascist elements.
In recent years, it has superficially appeared as if everything was moving to the right internationally. However, International Socialist Alternative has pointed out that what was taking place was a polarization, but that the right pole was more clearly recognizable in contrast to the left. There were signs of left-wing politicization in Germany, like in the climate movement, in feminist protests on March 8, and anti-fascist demonstrations. However, only a few limited successes were achieved, most notably strikes in the hospitals for a collective agreement on staff allocation and the coming together of the climate movement and trade unionists.
This time, though, the shift to the right did not go unanswered on the electoral field. The Left Party was down to 3% in opinion polls in November 2024, but on election day, 8.77% voted for it. A significant factor in the Left Party vote was that it represented a counterweight to the racist propaganda of the establishment parties — as the only party that did not scapegoat the immigrants. The whip of reaction drove huge layers of the youth to the left.
All camps were mobilized, with the highest participation in an election since German unification in 1990, with 82.5% taking part. The AfD was able to mobilize 1.86 million non-voters plus two million former conservative and liberal voters. The Left Party won the votes of 320,000 who abstained in the 2021 election, plus 1.2 million from the SPD and Greens.
The Left Party is the dominant party of the youth. Twenty-five percent of 18 to 24–year-olds voted for it. None of the establishment parties, including the Greens, received higher than 13% of the vote. However, 21% of 18 to 24-year-olds voted for the AfD, representing the political polarization that exists among young people. This is even sharper in Eastern Germany, where 34% of young voters voted for the Left Party and 32% for the AfD. Only 23% of young people in Eastern Germany voted for parties that existed in the West before 1990. In a nationwide school survey among youth between the ages of 12 and 17, The Left polled at 27%, and in many schools in big cities, polled at over 40%.
Even more important than the election results is the enormous growth of party membership of The Left. It doubled in a few months to 110,000 members (end of March 2025), the majority of these new members being young and female. This is the biggest left organizing drive in recent decades, transforming the party and creating great potential for resistance against the attacks of the newly formed conservative-led government and against the threat of racist division.
Racist Ideas on the Rise
While the importance of the left organizing drive should not be forgotten, it would be negligent to underestimate the danger of the far right. All establishment parties have shifted to the right, trailing behind the AfD, and thus helping them to build.
The election campaign was the most disgusting in living memory: all bourgeois parties tried to flatten the world’s crises — whether economic, political, ecological, or social — with a huge steamroller of racism. This had already been prepared for some time by the tightening of asylum laws by the SPD-led “traffic light coalition”, repression against pro-Palestinian activists, and the anti-social policies of all bourgeois parties, generally targeting the most vulnerable members of society, such as recipients of social benefits.
This impacted the mood of broad layers. The racist campaign culminated in Merz’s unprecedented move in the Bundestag on 29 January to push through resolutions on border closures supported by votes from the AfD. This broke the so-called “firewall” of mainstream parties historically refusing to rely on or govern with the hard-right. Forty-three percent of the population supported this approach.
While the Left Party got up to 30% of the vote in inner city areas in Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin, the AfD got 38.6% in the federal state of Thuringia and 37.3% in Saxony, with some constituencies giving them over 40% and even up to 50–60% in some smaller towns. The AfD is strongest among middle-aged voters between 35 and 55, especially among male manual workers.
The new voters of The Left Party, just like its new members, come primarily from universities and from urban, well-educated sections of the working class, e.g. from the education sector, the healthcare sector, and the media and IT industry. Many manual and production workers, on the other hand, voted for the AfD, the most anti-working-class party of all. Workers voting for the AfD increased 17% to 38% since 2021 while among the unemployed the AfD’s support also went up 17% to 34% in the same time period.
Voters who feel threatened by the economic situation and in poor areas are more likely to vote for the AfD. This is true for most parts of the East, but also for Western cities like Gelsenkirchen in the impoverished Ruhr region, where the SPD dominated for decades and the AfD secured a victory for the first time.
The new coalition led by Merz (CDU), together with the Social Democrats, will push further with racist policies and will – one way or another – try to close the border for asylum seekers. This won’t solve any problem and could precipitate a new wave of pressure along the lines of “don’t go only halfway, push even harder against migrants”. Meanwhile, the government pushed through the biggest rearmament drive since WW2, based exclusively on contracting new debt. This will lead to a new wave of cuts to social services.
This mixture of state racism, repression, warmongering, and social decline will be a breeding ground for the extreme right – and will also lead to resistance and to opportunities to build a left alternative.
A Fascist Party?
The AfD was founded in 2012 as a party of “eurosceptical professors” which had some anti-migrant policies, but tried to paint itself as moderate. This didn’t last long. Every change in the leadership shifted the party further to the right. The influx of over one million refugees following the Syrian civil war in 2015 and the Ukrainian refugee wave were used by the AfD to sharpen their propaganda of hate.
Its programme is brutally neo-liberal. They propose slashing social services and enormous tax cuts for the rich, and only some breadcrumbs of lower taxes for average wage earners or the low paid. Their financial demands would add up to a bankrupt state. This doesn’t prevent them from playing the tune of social demagogy and presenting themselves as the champions of the ordinary workers.
The AfD includes a strong proto-fascist trend. In 2015, the ideological fascists around Bjoern Hoecke from Thuringia organized as “The Wing”. It was formally dissolved in 2020 after the party’s national committee demanded this. But this was no defeat for them. Their ideas have become much more widespread in the party than ever. Today Hoecke is one of the prominent leaders of the party, flirting with Nazi vocabulary and gestures.
The rise of the AfD and its development towards the extreme right encourages racist violence by “lone wolves” and organized Nazi groups. In December 2024, an extreme Islamophobic individual (from Saudi Arabia!) drove his car into a crowd at the Magdeburg Christmas Market, killing six people and injuring 299. We are also seeing a revival of provocative fascist marches since the beginning of 2025, and even a “retro” wave of Nazis dressing up like they did in the 1990s – “the baseball bat years” as they are called in the Eastern federal states – with Skinhead-style military boots and bomber jackets.
However, the AfD is not (yet) a classic fascist party with organized violent thugs systematically attacking political opponents. While it incites racism and violence, the party itself focuses on parliamentary methods, institutions, and propaganda mainly through social media channels. They dissolved their youth wing “Young Alternative” in 2024 because it behaved too much like an activist organization, aping the open Nazi groupings.
Whether and when this will change depends on the development of the class struggle and how far the AfD might be institutionalized by cooperation with the bourgeois parties in the years to come. There is no ‘Chinese Wall’ between right-wing populism and fascist street activities.
It also may be necessary to update our Marxist definition of what fascism is today. It makes no sense shouting “Nazi!” at every right wing politician, but a new fascist regime today would not be straightforwardly modelled on Hitler’s regime in 1933.
The War and the East
The AfD got two big boosts in the 2020s. It intervened among the huge layer of Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers and built a base there. It also used the Ukraine War to agitate against the Ukrainian refugees and pose as antiwar. This got them a huge echo, especially in the East, where the mood is much more “Russian friendly” and “anti-American”. The stronger ties with Russia in the East are not all ideological. Many Eastern companies have been hit especially hard by the sanctions against Russia, which massively backfired on the German economy, fuelling the fear of economic and social decline.
All establishment parties became furious militarists after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Left Party was in disarray at that time. The wing around well-known party figure Sarah Wagenknecht, which left at the end of 2023, forming their own party, presented itself as antiwar and combined this with anti-migrant and antifeminist positions.
While the official position of The Left was and still is not to support weapons deliveries to Ukraine, many prominent figures like their Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Rackete gave support for arming Ukraine and to NATO. They only spoke about “Russian imperialism” but didn’t mention the Western brand – or just stayed silent. The unofficial slogan of The Left in the election seemed to be “don’t mention the war.” This confusion helped the AfD to paint itself as a party of peace and negotiations.
Thirty-five years after reunification, East Germans earn less and are almost absent from leading positions in the public sector or private companies. Many industrial and skilled jobs have been destroyed and replaced by precarious labor. Many feel like their whole life has been devalued. More than 20% identify as “East German” and not as “German” (opinion poll, autumn 2023). Among all age groups in the East the parties seen more as “Eastern” – AfD, The Left, the Alliance Sarah Wagenknecht – scored a majority in the general election, while the established “Western parties” – CDU, SPD, Greens, Liberals – only got 39% in the East. This shows a massive alienation from the political and economic system imposed by West German companies and politicians after unification.
How to Fight the AfD?
The establishment parties can’t fight the far right effectively. They try to marginalize them at an institutional level, but then take on board their policies. The anti-migrant measures of the CDU and SPD today are to the right of what the AfD demanded ten years ago. They tried to portray the AfD as “anti-patriotic elements”, as agents of Russia and China. As many are critical of NATO imperialism, these accusations found no big echo apart from the staunch supporters of Greens, Social Democrats, or Conservatives.
While they try to keep them out at this juncture, things will change. The next phase might see CDU-AfD cooperation starting at council level, then federal states. The main obstacle to bring the AfD into government in this phase will be their pro-Putin stance, but they are no principled opponents of German militarism. There will be international crises and shocks which transform the situation.
It’s up to the workers’ movement and The Left to stop the far right. The AfD has grown in support far beyond the stage where antifascist street activities like counter-mobilizations against marches and meetings are sufficient to stop them. What is central is to build a political alternative.
To achieve this, the Left Party has to present a radical program and a clear anti-establishment attitude. It has to draw a class line between itself and the bourgeois parties. The idea of going into capitalist governments has to be thrown in the dustbin. The participation in the regional governments of the federal states of Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has to be ended immediately.
In March, ministers of the Left Party didn’t prevent the “Yes” of their federal state governments to finance the enormous armament program. They could have insisted, which would have meant the state governments had to abstain. But they bowed down to the pressure. This was not only an utter betrayal of the party program, it also helps the AfD to boast about its (fake) pro-peace position.
The Left have to take the lead in the fight against emerging German militarism. They have to counter the increasingly hysterical warmongering propaganda on a daily basis. They should organize a broad campaign amongst the youth against the reintroduction of conscription (which is clearly being prepared, although the details were not clear at the time of writing).
A clear socialist and anti imperialist programme has to be combined with patient and tenacious organizing work amongst tenants and workers to reach out also to voters of the AfD and show that The Left is fighting for their class interests not the extreme right. The Left should not make any concessions to reactionary ideas like racism, antifeminism or transphobia. It should propose in the broader labor movement to campaign against racism and against the AfD and to support struggles against special oppression like those for reproductive rights, against gender based violence, and for trans rights. But at the same time, it shouldn’t demand preconditions from ordinary workers for a common struggle based on class interests. When The Left transforms into a fighting force, it can win over parts of the AfD electorate through common struggle combined with explaining left ideas patiently and skillfully.
Fighting for workers’ rights means taking a critical position towards the leadership of the unions. They demobilized workers over the last period, contributed to disorientation, and encouraged a culture of passivity within the working class. Passivity and discontent are a perfect breeding ground for right-wing ideas in the workplace. It gets even worse. Confronted with the historical crises of the German car industry and the perspective of mass layoffs and factory closures, the leadership of the metalworkers union (IG Metall) has no plan for an organized resistance but applauds the conversion of car factories into being part of the arms industry “to save jobs” and “the need to defend”.
Up until now, the Left Party leadership has been talking about the importance of union struggles and supporting strikes for higher wages, etc. This is good. But it is not enough: It is necessary to cut across the failed policies of the bureaucracy and to build a fighting wing inside the unions. The active young members of the party can play a crucial role in this.
