Germany's Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is planning a massive communications expansion as it takes aim at the German mainstream media landscape. The party will seek to build on its social media successes.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/F. May
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Germany's populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party will on Saturday announce plans to set up a television studio in its Berlin offices and employ up 20 new communications staff.
According to advanced excerpts of a report slated to be published in full in Saturday's edition of German news magazine Focus, the AfD is looking to bypass Germany's mainstream media landscape and build on its successes in communicating directly to the public. The far-right party is reportedly looking to launch the service in April.
"As long as the AfD is ignored by many media or is belittled with targeted 'fake news,' this can be the only way," Focus quoted AfD leader Alice Weidel as saying.
The AfD newsroom staff members are expected to work in shifts round the clock, with three members dedicated to research and spotting topics that Weidel alleges "are swept under the carpet." These are to be "cleaned up journalistically and edited for the public."
The far-right party entered the Bundestag for the first time last year after it picked up almost 13 percent of the vote in September's federal election, finishing third nationwide. It is therefore set to become the main opposition party in the German parliament, given the decision taken on Wednesday by Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative bloc and the Social Democrats to form a grand coalition.
Campaigning in the modern age
The AfD will seek to leverage its significant presence on social media to disseminate its messages.
Around a month before the election, it emerged that the populist party had commissioned Harris Media, the consultancy group that worked on projects for US President Donald Trump's campaign during the Republican primaries.
A subsequent Oxford University study published shortly before the federal election found that the populist party drove almost one-third of all political Twitter traffic, more than any other party and more even than nonpartisan discussion.
Since then, however, the party has fallen foul of Germany's new hate speech laws. Leading AfD figure Beatrix von Storch was one of the first people to be hit by the new regulations. After Cologne police tweeted New Year's greetings and linked to safety information in a number of different languages, including Arabic, von Storch took to social media to accuse the authorities of appeasing "barbaric, gang-raping hordes of Muslim men." Her account was subsequently suspended for 12 hours.
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Leading members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have often made provocative, if not outright offensive, remarks — targeting refugees or evoking Nazi terminology.
Image: Britta Pedersen/dpa/picture alliance
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia first made headlines in 2017 for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. In July 2023, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by declaring that "This EU must die so that the true Europe may live." In 2019, a court ruled that it was not slanderous to describe Höcke as a fascist.
Image: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Alice Weidel
One of the best-known public faces of the AfD, party co-chair Alice Weidel rarely shies away from causing a row. Her belligerent rhetoric caused particular controversy in a Bundestag speech in 2018, when she declared, "burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state."
Image: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/picture-alliance
Maximilian Krah
Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, has called the EU a "vassal" of the US and wants to replace it with a "confederacy of fatherlands." He also wants to end support for Ukraine, and has warned on Twitter that immigration will lead to an "Umvolkung" of the German people — a Nazi-era term similar to the far-right's "great replacement" conspiracy theory.
Image: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images
Alexander Gauland
Former parliamentary party leader Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. He said Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
Image: Soeren Stache/dpa/picture-alliance
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
Harald Weyel
Not all of the AfD's scandals are about racism: Sometimes they are just revealing. Bundestag member Harald Weyel was caught in a scandal in September 2022 when a microphone he clearly didn't know was on caught him expressing his hope that Germany would suffer a "dramatic winter" of high energy prices or else "things will just go on as ever."
Image: Christoph Hardt /Future Image/imago images
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
