Like all political parties in Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany is a commercial operation. A special national system finances political parties from federal taxes, paying for elections, advertising and the running of party offices. Berlin provides this money to anyone who can demonstrate an ability to attract votes, and the AfD has proved itself to be a smart operator, taking advantage of this arrangement to promote its brand. But from another point of view, the traditional political parties have been lax in allowing this largely unknown newcomer to take liberties with the system, in particular by using federal funds to set up a nationwide media and social media empire promoting its extreme right-wing views.
The funding system got started in West Germany during the Cold War, with state grants first granted in 1959, leading eventually to the Parteiengesetz, or Political Parties Act, of 1967. (It was updated in 1992 after unification.) From reimbursement of party expenses, it has developed into a system of stable, long-term funding of political parties. But it was assumed that these parties would participate in Germany’s democratic political process and share its values.
National politics has long been dominated by two rather similar large formations claiming the political center: the Christian Democrats plus their Bavarian twin, the Christian-Social Union (CDU/CSU), and the Social Democrats (SPD). But European parliamentary democracy needs multiple political parties, and Germany provides luxurious conditions for little seeds to grow. The Green Party, for instance, managed to grow out of 1970s activism against pollution, nuclear weapons and the arms race. In other countries, this popular and largely youth-driven social movement has mostly been excluded from power. In Germany, it has become a major political force.
There are two main sources of funding available for political parties. One is the national system established in federal law, described above; the other is the European Union, in which Germany, as Europe’s largest economy, plays a leading role.
German state funding, on the other hand, does go directly to political parties.
The billions of euros available from European Commission funds do not go directly to political parties, but rather to the regions or cities that they govern, creating the welcome illusion that whichever local politicians have won the elections have also somehow become responsible for providing all this free cash. Saxony-Anhalt, the formerly East German state which has just missed giving the AfD an absolute majority, is receiving 2.95 billion euros from the European Commission under various development schemes in the current funding period of 2021-2027.
German state funding, on the other hand, does go directly to political parties, the idea being that smaller parties need financial help in running their party offices and parliamentary business. Incredibly, this means that the AfD, which plans mass deportations, including of German passport holders if they are not judged to be sufficiently German, is granted about 500 million euros from the Federal Parliament or Bundestag for its current funding window, 2025-29. There is a system that directly rewards parties for receiving votes, so that each vote makes a party about one euro in direct payment, while each euro donated to the party earns 45 cents of federal funding as a top-up.
The established parties are all quite happy with this system, which allows German states to fund their own governments in Germany’s devolved system. But it also means that local AfD offices away from the federal capital can give full-time jobs to the many actual Nazis working in the party.
What do they do with these luxurious positions? They mostly make TikTok videos and YouTube shorts.
While much of the donated income comes from prosperous retirees, the AfD aims its media operation squarely at the youth, and its state-funded media operation has been very successful. The famous Hamburg newsmagazine Der Spiegel investigated the TikTok accounts of the main players during the Saxony-Anhalt election. The CDU candidate, Sven Schulze, who was the acting minister-president of the region, had 3,522 followers. The Left Party leader Eva von Angern had 7,189. The AfD candidate, Ulrich Siegmund had 806,300.
One reason for this huge difference is the AfD head start. The party began its TikTok campaign in 2021, while the CDU launched an account just this year. The result? In Saxony-Anhalt, the CDU, supposedly the party running the country, managed 17% of votes, but any illusion that this was good news was blown away by this week’s results from another region, Meckleburg-Western Pomerania, where for the first time ever across the whole country the CDU failed to reach the 5% threshold and will have no seats in the state parliament.
Germany, in other words, is funding its own political suicide. The dust has not settled yet, and it remains to be seen if all the other parties can effectively close ranks as usual to pretend the AfD doesn’t exist. But even if they can, it is a stopgap measure. The German Federal Constitution envisages prohibiting state funding for parties “oriented toward an undermining or abolition of the free democratic basic order or an endangerment of the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany.” But this has never been enforced, and with millions of people voting freely for the AfD, banning it on democratic grounds is a shaky proposition and would require an intervention from the Federal Constitutional Court.
A more promising avenue for arresting the party’s growth is cutting off EU funding.
The AfD aims its media operation squarely at the youth.
When the euro-billions are flowing, local politicians are always happy to take the credit. But the downside is that they will also get the blame if it suddenly disappears. And this can actually happen. In Poland, between 2019 and 2024, about a third of regions and municipalities, expressing the country’s extremist Catholic traditions, declared “LGBT-free zones.” There was a complex reaction, but one of the most important moves was the threat to suspend EU funding. As in Germany, this would tend to go to poorer regions, and one by one the Polish regions gave up, with the last remaining “zone” closed down in May 2025.
Even more strikingly, withdrawing EU development funding played a major role in removing Trump ’s favorite European leader, Viktor Orbán, from power in Hungary. The European Commission, led by veteran CDU politician Ursula von der Leyen, a former minister in Angela Merkel’s government, does not suffer too much from democracy, and without any sign of a mandate from an electorate that is adopting infantile nationalistic goals in country after country across the continent, Europe’s billions make a useful cudgel for beating any anti-Europeans that show up into silence.
Meanwhile, as Brussels mulls using its power to halt the AfD’s rise, there aren’t many signs of resistance coming from the main German parties. The federal chancellor, Friedrich Merz, only rubs his hand miserably and says what a catastrophe it all is. Berlin seems safe from the AfD for now, where left-wing parties are threatening to take power. But beyond city limits, the once-solid center is collapsing.
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How Germany’s Electoral System Enabled the Rise of the Far Right
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