AfD
Our analysis · imported snapshot
What it wants to change
Party says · 2025 manifesto
- Migration: reject many asylum entrants at borders, leave the common EU asylum framework, abolish various residence rules and pursue “remigration” policies.[16]
- EU: return powers to nation states; the 2025 programme seeks a new “Bund europäischer Nationen” and a referendum-oriented return of monetary sovereignty; bpb describes an exit option as part of the party's strategy if the EU cannot be remade.[16]
- Economy & welfare: large tax cuts including ending the solidarity surcharge and inheritance tax; maintain the debt brake; stronger work obligations for long-term basic-income recipients; simultaneously expand some family/pension benefits.[16]
- Climate & energy: rejects Germany's current decarbonisation path, abolish CO₂ levies, return to nuclear power, retain/revive fossil generation and resist wind expansion.[16]
- Russia & Ukraine: end sanctions and restore economic/energy relations with Russia; sharply different from the current government's Ukraine policy.[16]
- Society: nationalist-conservative conception of identity and a stronger preference for traditional family roles.[16]
In one sentence: the AfD aims at a much more nationally sovereign, migration-restrictive and culturally conservative Germany, with a fundamental break from the current EU, climate and Russia-policy consensus.[17][18]
Following, strongholds & legal status
The party's support is substantially stronger in eastern Germany: bpb says its eastern voter potential is more than twice its western level. Its voters are disproportionately male and concentrated in middle age groups. Saxony, Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt have been central strongholds; today's Saxony-Anhalt election deepened that pattern.[19][43]
Legal/intelligence-service context: do not conflate state and federal classifications. The federal party is currently again treated as a Verdachtsfall (suspected case) after the Cologne Administrative Court blocked the BfV's higher “confirmed” classification pending the main proceedings. Several state associations retain confirmed right-extremist classifications.[20]
Today: largest federal opposition party by seats and first in the latest ARD national poll; no settled federal or Land government headed by the AfD at the time this snapshot was compiled.