With Elon Musk cheering on Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and US Vice President JD Vance suggesting that the government was politically repressing it, you’ve probably heard more in the news lately about the party than ever before.
The AfD came into existence in 2013, staking its position in its early years as one of the country’s leading Euroskeptic, anti-immigrant parties. Today, the AfD has 77 seats in Germany’s Bundestag, more than 280 in state parliaments, and 15 in the European Parliament.
But how did the AfD build such a broad base of support? According to a paper at the International Political Science Review, that happened, in part, thanks to successes of the party’s influential youth wing, the Junge Alternative (the JA, or Young Alternative).
Parties across Europe have youth wings, wrote Anna-Sophie Heinze, but studies focused on the far right often neglect the role of youth wings, despite the fact that they serve as “important drivers” in radicalization.
Heinze dug into the JA because the AfD is “one of the youngest successful radical right parties in Europe,” and although there is an “ambivalent relationship” between the youth wing and the party, around seven out of every 10 JA members are also AfD members.
More specifically, Heinze looked at the way JA’s radicalization interacted with the radicalization of its “mother party.” To that end, she conducted interviews with JA members, analyzed the youth group’s social media output and literature, and examined official JA and AfD documents as well as those of intelligence services.
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Over time, Heinze explained, the JA and the AfD became cozier, and by 2017, around 8.5% of AfD members in the Bundestag were also members of the JA. For its part, the AfD has walked a tightrope between taking harder right-wing stances and presenting in a way that could help it build a more robust appearance of legitimacy in the eyes of voters and other parties.
Yet, even as the JA became the party’s official youth wing and the AfD build a broader base of support, the youth wing has since 2020 moved toward more “open” extreme right positions.
“In the long term, organizational development and radicalization went hand in hand,” the author noted. “The JA even seemed to be a driver or at least reflector of the AfD’s radicalization.”
Because the JA has earned the designation of a “proven extremist” group in Germany, intelligence services have monitored many of its members in recent years. Likewise, the AfD itself has been under the watchful eye of the intelligence services for years.
The JA even seemed to be a driver or at least reflector of the AfD’s radicalization.
Pointing to the AfD’s history of at times distancing itself from the youth wing, Heinze wrote that the party nonetheless never split from the JA. “Instead, both organizations increasingly tried to present themselves as the (only) ‘true opposition’ fighting against the corrupt elites and intelligence services,” she wrote.
The JA did not act alone in radicalizing its mother party, Heinze noted, but “youth wings are an important dimension of party organization for the far right.” She added, “Studying them can help to identify extremist tendencies at an early stage and develop political and civic counter measures.”
