The Unabashedly Provocative Youth Driving Germany’s Far Right

The Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, with its anti-immigrant and nationalist platform, has long been the pariah of German politics. Its members have been fined for Nazi slogans and labeled extremist by the government.

Ahead of Sunday’s national parliamentary election, a new band of influencers has found a voice among voters by bringing a more youthful edge to the party known for its provocations and controversies. They welcome the scorn of protesters, journalists and the mainstream political parties. Some of them still trade jokes about Hitler and Jews, along with the occasional Sig Heil salute.

Their party’s energy and ethos has won approving nods from Elon Musk, an adviser to President Trump, and from Vice President JD Vance. And they have helped elevate the party to second in the polls, even as the political establishment has kept the AfD out of government as part of a longstanding commitment to sideline parties deemed extreme.

They are the changing face of the AfD.

When Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, 28, first went to an AfD event in 2017, she was surrounded by retirees. “They could have been my grandparents,” she said. Things have changed. Young people who might have been punks or hippies in a different time are now finding the AfD, she said — and posting about it.

Ms. Kaiser is a parliamentary candidate and a personal assistant in the office of Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD. She canvassed for the party on a frigid Saturday morning in Sittensen, a small town outside Hamburg. She picked the spot because she had been uninvited from a panel discussion there because of lingering controversy over a social media post that violated a law against hate speech.

In 2021, Ms. Kaiser on Facebook criticized Germany’s acceptance of immigrants from Afghanistan. In the post, she asked Hamburg’s mayor whether he was creating a “welcome culture for gang rapes?” The government fined her 6,000 euros ($6,275) and convicted her of inciting racial hatred. Her online following grew.

Other young activists have embraced confrontation to win votes and gain followers.

On a recent Saturday, Michelle Gollan, 23, stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin with a stern look on her face. She held a microphone adorned with the name of her YouTube channel, “eingollan,” which has nearly 200,000 subscribers.

Her poster read “remigration,” considered AfD code for deportations. The dot on the “i” has been replaced by a pink AfD arrow.

She was trying to attract protesters to talk to her, to feed a new video and, she said, introduce her viewers to new ideas. She succeeded with a woman with an anti-AfD sticker on her jacket and a rainbow flag draped around her shoulders, who briefly debated her.

The tense discussion left a huge grin on Ms. Gollan’s face: “For me, being provocative also means triggering people.”

Whenever the AfD rallies in the streets, as it did in Munich this month after a mother and child were killed by an immigrant in a car attack, protesters show up. And when protesters march against the party, as hundreds of thousands have done already in Berlin during this campaign, young AfD activists show up in turn.

At such demonstrations, Christopher Tamm, 24, likes to wear a hoodie emblazoned with the logo of the AfD’s youth wing, which is classified as extremist by German intelligence. “I openly say that I am right-wing, that I stand for right-wing politics,” Mr. Tamm said.

The next morning, near Hamburg, an AfD supporter waved good morning to fellow volunteers who were canvassing for the elections. He left his hand up in a Hitler salute, which is illegal in Germany. “Keep your arm up like this a bit longer,” he said.

Being provocative and promoting fear and hate work well on social media, but that tone shouldn’t be adopted by a mainstream party, said Emilia Fester, 26, a member of Parliament from the Greens party. Ms. Fester isn’t shy about speaking out against the AfD. Whenever it spreads lies or disinformation on social media, she said, “That is something one must clearly call out and limit.”

The young AfD activists are an extension of a party that has found support in many corners of Germany since its founding in 2013. It is a party no longer defined by a single demographic, but infused more broadly into a society where many still see the AfD as far-right extremists. In doing so, they have created their own counterculture.

Wutbürger, a German rock band whose name translates to “enraged citizen,” started out making patriotic anti-establishment music. It has since embraced a far-right identity and fan base, forging close ties with some AfD politicians. It has also been classified as a “right-wing extremist group” by a state government in Germany.

The band’s song “Walhalla,” including the lyric “we send our enemies back to the Orient,” has gone viral.

“We achieved our own counterculture. Our own music, our own rap culture, our own rock culture,” said Andy Habermann, the band’s leader. “We don’t hear the mainstream anymore, we don’t see them on TV, we don’t listen to the mainstream anymore on the radio. We know they are filtered, sadly. We have no more trust.”