German voters' willingness to back the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has risen sharply, according to extremism researcher Gideon Botsch, even though in his view the party is moving increasingly further to the right.
"We assume that the willingness to vote for the AfD has risen massively and the stigma that may be associated with voting for the AfD has clearly diminished," Botsch told dpa.
The political scientist heads the Emil Julius Gumbel Research Centre for Antisemitism and Right-Wing Extremism at the Moses Mendelssohn Centre in Potsdam.
The AfD has topped recent opinion polls, reaching up to 29% nationwide in Germany's typical polling question of which party voters would most likely give their support if elections were held next Sunday. Opinion polls are generally subject to uncertainties.
Clientele has grown
The AfD has, in the researcher's assessment, also gained more supporters on a tougher migration policy. "We have long assessed the AfD in Brandenburg as having a core electorate of up to a quarter of the population," said Botsch, who is based in Brandenburg, the rural state that surrounds Berlin.
"Especially since around 2023, the AfD has been able to expand its clientele significantly. This is linked to national politics and the clear attempt [by the mainstream conservative parties] to outflank the AfD on the right," he said.
Brandenburg's state Premier Dietmar Woidke, a Social Democrat, had also tried to "poach voters from the AfD," the academic said. "It has not been weakened by this policy but strengthened."
The party's issues had seemingly been validated, "above all in portraying migration as the main problem area in Germany."
The Brandenburg domestic intelligence agency classifies the regional AfD chapter as far-right extremist. The party is taking legal action against this.
The AfD has also been classified as far-right extremist in the states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Lower Saxony, though the classification in Lower Saxony has been put on hold due to a lawsuit.
At the national level, the AfD was classified as a confirmed extremist organization by domestic intelligence last year - a label the party is challenging in court.
Botsch: Other parties retreating
In the researcher's view, the other parties are retreating from the grassroots. He illustrated this with the example of mayoral elections.
"I think we must not have any illusions that the AfD has good chances of winning further top municipal offices in the coming years, particularly at the mayoral level," Botsch said.
René Stadtkewitz became Brandenburg's first AfD mayor when he won the election for the job on May 10 in Zehdenick, some 60 kilometres north of Berlin - without having to contest a run off.
"That the AfD managed it in Zehdenick in the first round is alarming," Botsch said. He noted that apart from the Free Democratic Party (FDP), which is not represented in the Brandenburg state parliament, none of the other mainstream parties even fielded a candidate to run against Stadtkewitz.
They should "urgently learn" from that, he said. He also pointed to the trend of increasingly independent candidates winning.
Researcher: AfD continues to radicalize
According to the researcher, the AfD continues to move further to the right. "In the process, the party is becoming increasingly far-right, radicalizing itself further and incorporating more and more elements of neo-Nazism, at least in the state of Brandenburg," Botsch said.
"It is now also doing this quite openly and unabashedly," he said.
He pointed to a post by AfD state lawmaker Dominik Kaufner on Instagram, in which he had described May 8, 1945 not as the day of liberation from National Socialism but as the day of destruction.
"That is something we have so far only been used to from neo-Nazism and that is the trend the party is following," Botsch said.
