Far right party Alternative for Germany says membership has grown by 60% to 46,881 since January 2023
Far right party Alternative for Germany says membership has grown by 60% to 46,881 since January 2023
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"60% growth" seems large, but there are almost 85,000,000 people in Germany, so we're talking about growing from ~0.03% to ~0.05% of the population here.
You're saying this now but they're on course to leave the left in the dust and are likely to compete with greens in terms of members and votes by election sunday next year.
How relevant is that in terms of government leadership?
They start getting seats
Is that politically significant?
Yes, to some extent. More seats means more pressure
So they wouldn't have significant political power, but they would have a political presence at all, which feels threatening?
They already have a presence, and are shaping the politics of Germany indirectly. As our leading conservative party (and our socialdemocatric middle -left party to some extent) makes the same error as in US as trying to cater to those extremist views. Which is frightening as fuck, as more and more fascist views are being adopted and normalized
Thanks, good to hear from a local.
You mean they're getting airtime to voice their views?
Which fascist views are being adopted?
Yes
Not really, they'd need to triple their numbers.
Numbers on the far left are misleading as Die Linke is bleeding members to the BSW but the BSW is taking their sweet time handing out membership cards, double-checking every single applicant. Reportedly they have a backlog of at least 8000 applicants or such and at least 20k people generally interested. Wagenknecht is at least 70% tankie so it doesn't surprise that they're doing a vanguard thing.
Since not everyone is expected to become member of a political party, a more apt comparison would be to membership numbers (and changes in those) for other German parties.
Yeah, that makes more sense:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitgliederentwicklung_der_deutschen_Parteien
AfD is still the smallest of the big parties. I expect them to overtake the Linke this year though.
Thanks for the link. Some big parties seem to have hundreds of thousands of members. Didn’t see much for 2024 other than:
Zu Beginn des Jahres 2024 meldeten mehrere Parteien einen starken Mitgliederzuwachs. Bündnis 90/Die Grünen berichteten von 8.000 Neumitgliedern in den ersten beiden Monaten des Jahres.
In any case, considering the political context of our times, AfD’s growth is nothing to scoff at.