The AfD is perhaps the biggest test yet for these boundaries. Though the party is hardly the first far-right movement to try to compete in Germany’s postwar political ecosystem, it’s by leaps and bounds the most successful one: More than five million people supported the AfD in the 2017 federal elections, earning it 12.6 percent of the vote nationally and more than 90 seats in the German Bundestag. And as of October, the party is represented in all 16 of Germany’s state legislatures.[...]
When it comes to the party’s rhetoric about refugees and migrants, AfD leaders have even at times run afoul of online hate-speech laws, with one lawmaker finding herself temporarily suspended from Twitter and Facebook last year after posting about “barbaric, gang-raping Muslim hordes.” And the Chemnitz riots, which saw AfD supporters and radical far-right groups such as Pegida marching side by side, showed the extent to which harsh rhetoric about refugees can turn into violent action.[...]
That, combined with some party members’ ties to other monitored extremist groups—the Young Alternative, AfD’s youth wing, was placed under surveillance in part because of its ties to the far-right extremist group Generation Identity, for example—gives the impression that the AfD tolerates, if not advocates for, extremist views. (Even Bernd Lucke, one of the original founders of the party who has since left, recently said that he believes the Verfassungsschutz is right to monitor some parts of the party.)
"It may be that the majority of the AfD doesn't agree with everything Mr. Höcke says. The decisive thing is that Mr. Höcke isn't marginalized and isn't isolated,” says Axel Salheiser, a researcher who focuses on extremism at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, in eastern Germany.[...]
The AfD “triggers the kind of debate that you want to have in a live democracy, where people have to define the terms on which debate has to be had, again and again,” he told me. “It is also ... a signal that democracy wants to defend itself, no matter how difficult.”
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