Everybody can see why. All over europe.
Yes, but make no mistake: AfD has a significant extremist underbelly, particularly in East Germany. And I mean
real right-wing extremism, not conservatism slandered by the media. It's not surprising to me that Le Pen didn't want to cooperate with them any longer.
Just a couple of random dicta from all echelons of the party:
"Those pigs [the German government] are merely puppets of the allied powers. Their task is to use the influx of migrants to keep the German people down by way of plunging our cities into virtual civil war."—
Alice Weidel, national co-chair
"Prior to their americanisation, the whites and the blacks had been vastly differentiated peoples with their own identities. Now, they've become a mess. We Europeans don't want this degeneration and keep the peoples apart."—Björn Höcke, Thuringia caucus chairman (and party strongman), in his book 'Never Into the Same River Twice'
"[When we pursue our policies], the German people will lose those who are too weak or unwilling to oppose the increased africanisation, orientalisation and islamisation. […] I have a blood-letting in mind."—ibd.
"This so-called immigration policy is just a government-mandated multi-cultural coup d'etat to abolish the German people."—
the same, during a rally in 2019
"We'll have to be peaceful and considerate, maybe we'll even have to adapt and tell the political opponent what they want to hear. But once we're there, we'll put them up against the wall. And then: six feet under they go, a layer of lime on top, job's a good 'un.—
Holger Arppe, then co-chair of the Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania state caucus
"I wouldn't sentence someone who burns down an asylum seeker hostel with people in it."
—Marcel Grauf, then Baden-Würrtemberg state caucus chief of staff
[In response to being told that African countries punish homosexuality with imprisonment] "We should do that, too!"—
Andreas Gehlmann, then member of parliament for Saxony-Anhalt
"Breivik may have been a murderer, but he wasn't wrong."—
Dr. Kai Borrmann, scientific advisor to the Berlin state caucus
"We need our own SA and make a clean sweep!"—
Andreas Geithe, then chief whip for the Berlin-Pankow district caucus
Now, to be clear, AfD actually sanctioned most of the aforementioned for violations of the party code. Arppe was made to resign, Greithe was kicked out. That doesn't change the fact that they keep attracting the same kind of people over and over again. And particularly in Saxony and Thuringia, they're deeply in cahoots with actual Neo-Nazis—and the electorate rolls with it.
AfD was founded in 2013 by conservative and libertarian academics opposing the Greece bailout. Back then, their manifesto was by and large a white sheet. But when the refugee crisis began, they swiftly moved to the right, with most of the original functionaries leaving by their own accord. In my opinion, AfD chose to ditch the hassle of pursuing majority-appeal right-wing politics in favour of whoring themselves out to the extreme right in East Germany, knowing its loyalty would be ironclad and they'd never have to worry about being re-elected again. (Prior to AfD, right-wing parties used to have a way of becoming irrelevant rather swiftly.)
In doing so, they also tained what I'd consider common sense politics with an air of Nazism, and I will never not hold that against them
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