The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has doubled down on its pledge to take Germany out of the European Union and the single currency, the euro, if it gained power.

In a draft election manifesto sent to its members ahead of a vote in the party conference scheduled for early January, the anti-immigration party repeated a promise from its European election campaign in the summer, saying, "We consider it necessary for Germany to leave the European Union and to establish a new European community."

In place of the EU, the AfD wants to introduce something it calls a "Europe of fatherlands" — an association of states that would include a common market and an "economic and interests community."

The AfD also wants to take Germany out of Europe's common euro currency which was introduced in 2002, and replace it with what it calls a "transfer union." The party admits in the manifesto that a "hard cut" would be counterproductive and proposes renegotiating relations with all the member states as well as other European countries.

The AfD wants Germany to hold a referendum on the issue — though actually getting out of the EU wouldn't be that easy, since Germany's membership is anchored in the German Constitution, the Basic Law. Even if some future AfD-led German government were to declare Germany's exit from the EU, it would effectively be unconstitutional, as a "Dexit" would also require a two-thirds majority in the German parliament.

Too late for Dexit? Or not?

The AfD's plan does represent a toughening of the party's position on the EU: It was only in February 2024 that the party's co-leader Tino Chrupalla said that it was "too late" for Germany to leave the EU.

His co-leader and the party's chancellor candidate Alice Weidel described Dexit merely as a "Plan B" in an interview with the British Financial Times earlier this year.

Germany's leading economic institutes and industry associations have all condemned the proposal. The Cologne-based German Economic Institute (IW) concluded in a study in May this year that, over five years, leaving the EU would cost the country €690 billion ($725 billion), cause the country's GDP to shrink by 5.6%, and would mean 2.5 million fewer jobs on the market. The damage would be "comparable with the coronavirus crisis and the energy crisis put together," the IW study said.

The German Association of Small and Medium Businesses (BVMW) was even more excoriating, describing the AfD's plan as an "economic kamikaze mission."

In a statement released ahead of the EU election in June 2024, the BVMW set out all the positives that the single currency brings to small and medium-sized businesses: "The monetary union is a useful complement to the EU single market. The EU single market makes it considerably easier for companies to sell goods and services in other EU countries. The euro helps to eliminate incalculable risks for companies in trade."

Ronald Gläser, an AfD spokesperson in Berlin, dismissed these concerns.

"Yes, Germany profits from the EU, but we believe that we would have the advantages of it if we arrived at other agreements," Gläser told DW. "And when economists claim that it would be an economic catastrophe, then all I can do is ask: Are those the same ones who said Europe and England would be terribly affected? I can remember all the horror scenarios around Brexit, and it all went more or less smoothly."

A report released by Cambridge Econometrics in January this year found that Brexit is stifling growth and employment in the UK, with an estimated three million fewer jobs in the country by 2035.

Learning from Brexit

The IW's study was based on studying the effects of Brexit on the regions of Britain that have similar economies to equivalent regions in Germany.

"Our estimate was fairly conservative," warned IW's executive director Hubertus Bardt, who co-authored the report. "We could easily have much stronger effects because we are more closely intertwined in the EU than the British were — we have the euro, which would mean more complications than the British had."

Dexit would mean that "we would be over 5 and a half percent poorer in five years' time," Bardt told DW. "That's a severe economic crisis with advanced warning." It would of course be particularly damaging for companies that depend on markets and suppliers elsewhere in the EU, he added.

The AfD's Gläser believes that an alternative version could still preserve free trade.

"Why should all the companies and consumers in Italy, France, Sweden, or wherever, not want German products anymore just because we're not in the EU anymore?" he said. "Switzerland isn't in the EU, and it exports to all these countries."

But Bardt had no time for the AfD's plan to replace the EU with a different economic community: "I consider this to be an unrealistic and meaningless notion or a smokescreen," he said. "Destroying the EU will not result in a new and better integration model emerging in its place."

The AfD's anti-EU roots

Nor is Dexit even remotely popular among the German population — a survey published earlier this year by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) — which is affiliated with the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) — found that 87% of Germans would vote to stay in the EU in a referendum.

So why has the AfD decided to include such a drastic and unpopular measure in its election manifesto? Gläser insisted that leaving the EU would be good for Germans, whether they liked it or not: "We don't do policies based on surveys — we want to implement what is necessary and important."

Wolfgang Schroeder, a political scientist at Kassel University, pointed out that the AfD's stance is consistent with its foundation — the party initially emerged in 2013 as a party of economists critical of the EU's bailouts following the euro crisis. Since then, it has drifted further right and anti-immigration, but its Euroscepticism has remained — though it is now less obvious.

AfD 'primarily a nationalist party'

"The AfD is primarily a nationalist party," Schroeder told DW. "It opposes globalization — that has always brought with it a skeptical attitude to international authorities. For them, all international organizations like the EU and the UN have their own aims and values, and so are a danger to the true will of the people."

But is the AfD serious about its proposal to replace the EU with another kind of international community, given the economic and constitutional headaches that this would cause?

"We could answer that in two ways," said Schroeder. "On the one hand, we could say they don't mean it seriously because they know they're representing a minority position, so they can formulate it simply to paint a picture of a different world — it doesn't cost them anything to say it."

Personally, Schroeder thinks the AfD position is kind of a cheap long-term bet: "They're betting that more and more countries that agree with this Euroskepticism, and that in future there will be a new development that goes in the direction of Eurasia, with new economic and political prospects."

Edited by Rina Goldenberg

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