Name: The dilemma that could test the AfD's rising popularity | DW News
Uploaded: 2025-11-20T16:57:22.000Z
Duration: 15 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The far right alternative for Germany, AFD is closer to power than ever before.

They're planning to make their leader, Ale Zweidel, Chancellor after the next elections in 2029.

But a battle is raging within the party over one word that could bring their dreams crashing down.

A potent far right idea that goes to the heart of nationalist desires to reverse decades of migration.

That's what the AFD want, but it could be kryptonite.

It's already led to infighting and it could sow the seeds of their destruction.

Shortly before crucial elections in early 2025, the AfD Co leader made it crystal clear her party was going to get tougher and go further on deportations.

That word and the sinister ideas behind it exploded into public consciousness in 2024.

Investigative journalists found that senior AFD members were part of a gathering at a villa near Berlin to hear from a leading European ethnonationalist.

They said Martin Cerner laid out his idea of remigration, the forced return of asylum seekers, economic immigrants, and

crucially, what he calls unassimilated citizens.

This was Sellner in an interview with DW in 2024.

If they prefer to live in an Islamic parallel society, they might as well just go to an Islamic state.

For Sellner, that includes people with citizenship, people he says don't belong here.

For people who are here legally, who have a passport, we have to have a system of high pressure and to offer them voluntarily to go to their home countries.

Millions protested in horror that a party with MPs was associated with a plan that echoed the beginnings of Germany's darkest history, the Holocaust.

Alice Weidel fired her longtime advisor who was at the meeting.

So when she later co opted the phrase, it was a big turnaround.

But was she really endorsing Sena's plan?

I asked Beatrix von Steuch, a parliamentary leader in the AfD, whether the party's understanding of re migration might include German citizens.

This is just a story which had been made up.

Despite those assurances about what remigration actually means, a prominent figure in the AFD wants his party to stop using the word altogether.

It is against the Constitution because it divides the citizenship in two classes of citizens, and

For some, a popular maverick, others an attention seeker.

Everything I told them is make clear that you don't mean citizens when you talk about remigration.

In May, Senna organized the first international re migration summit.

European politicians and activists met in Italy to discuss how to restore European cultural hegemony.

Peter Neumann studies right wing populist movements.

He's also advised Germany's ruling CDU party on national security.

So something that sounds innocuous like re migration is being used in order to hide a policy that is actually illiberal or in the case of the AfD and re migration is actually unconstitutional.

The AfD dispute that, but we'll get into that debate later.

Not long after Alice Weidel's speech, something happened that had until that point been unthinkable.

Friedrich Metz proposed two anti immigration bills to the German Parliament last week.

Matz got the votes for the motion with the support of the far right alternative for Germany, AfD.

In the febrile atmosphere after a deadly attack by a rejected asylum seeker, the conservative CDU party, then in opposition, wanted to take a stance.

They tabled a parliamentary motion calling for tougher migration rules.

For some it was the first crack in the firewall.

This informal rule that no party in the political centre ground works with the AfD.

It has shown that the CDU could gain a majority together with AfD.

So they could deliver if they wanted to, but they just don't want to.

Hopes among conservatives that they would wrest back the migration topic from the AFD and drain away their support proved wrong.

The 2025 election delivered the best AfD result ever, coming second with more than 20%.

For a very long time, German political scientists were always saying there's no chance for a truly right wing extremist party in Germany because the moment they become too extreme, they will lose popular support.

That's the history of most right wing, populist right wing extremist parties in the history of the Czech World Republic.

At this stage, it looks like the party is on the march.

It's managed to chip away at the firewall.

But then in May 2025, Germany's domestic intelligence agency has classified the far right alternative for Germany as an extremist organization.

A report from Germany's domestic intelligence agency states that the AFD aims to exclude certain population groups from social participation, subject them to unconstitutional unequal treatment and assign them a legally devalued status if a court upholds that judgment, that members of the party could be barred from jobs in the public service, from jobs in the police, from jobs in the civil service, from every public sector job.

And that would be quite a problem for a lot of AFD members.

The report also points out that many AFD members and lawmakers say they want to deport millions of many more than the hundreds of thousands who can legally be deported.

It explicitly references Viedal's re migration speech, saying it was designed to cater to voices within the party calling for blanket re migration of millions.

The AFD is challenging the extremist label in court, pushing back against the narrative that they are a threat to Germany.

This is how the party to change that narrative.

It's a polarising plan to win power, to bind its core voters, to persuade swing voters to break the firewall.

But could the debate over the meaning of re migration risk it all?

some people within the party, like Maximilian Krah, have recognized that more and more people understand it as a very general phrase to reverse every migration movement we have seen in the last decades, including those migrants who are already naturalized.

Remember, it's that crucial element of whether re migration would include people who have German passports, which is at the crux of this fight, that would effectively base German citizenship on ideas of race or assimilation rather than legal status.

So let's take a look at how remigration both hurts and helps the AFD strategy.

Remigration fires up the base, helping to bind its core voters.

They want to see the million or so people who've come to Germany since 2015 sent back.

And many are not picky about whether some of those people now have German citizenship.

But a survey showed 85% of Germans overall reject remigration.

For some protesters, the idea carries echoes of Germany's history with the Nazis.

So here, remigration could harm efforts to persuade swing voters.

This key strategic element may become more difficult.

If that unpopular connection sticks to the word remigration, it may scare off other parties from cooperating with the AFD and lock them out of any power sharing deal.

You won't find the word remigration in recent AFD policy documents.

Yet party bosses aren't outright distancing themselves from the term.

And so it's sort of like the AFD is trying to have its cake and eat it.

On the one hand, insisting that its focus is on legal Deportations to appeal to the wider public, while at the same time still talking about re migration as a nod to the base.

So the AFD has for some time now practiced a sort of double speak in the sense, on the one hand they are publishing all these programs, these manifestos, which sound very moderate, which are intended to sound very moderate, but

then you listen to some of their leaders and they are telling entirely different stories.

The other problem for the party is that they cannot control the word.

And the term, how it is used by the people outside the party, including citizens, is something I don't want to be aligned with.

And the party has to understand that you can have a term and a definition, but

There's an own life, there's an own development.

Von Steuch is overseeing the party's power strategy.

In every single interview, this question, what's about this term re migration?

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The dilemma that could test the AfD's rising popularity | DW News

crucial

sort

phrase

significant