ORANIENBURG, Germany — Mario, 44, thinks Germany is changing too much.

He worries it’s no longer safe to bike down some streets. He thinks the students at his kids’ school speak too many languages that aren’t German. And he resents that newcomers seem to be getting benefits that longtime residents don’t.

For Mario, there’s one culprit he sees at the root of these concerns, and it’s the influx of immigration the country has experienced in the last few years. Like the US, Germany has seen a recent uptick in immigration — 2022 and 2023 saw a high number of migrants entering the European country — due to growing global displacement, the war in Ukraine, and ongoing instability in northern Africa and the Middle East. Also like in the US, that surge in immigration has been weaponized by the far right in order to achieve their own political gains.

In Germany, one party in particular is capitalizing on it: the Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.

“Heimat,” Mario said, using a term which roughly means “home” in German, when asked his reason for supporting the party. “It’s just not nice anymore. It can get better, quite simply, through less migration.”

AfD’s support in national polls, as well as its success in regional elections, has been alarming for many Germans ahead of pivotal state elections taking place this year, when the party could make serious gains. Three major races are occurring in eastern Germany, where AfD has some of its firmest strongholds, and where it could feasibly achieve what it hasn’t anywhere else: becoming a legitimate governing partner for other parties.

“I simply cannot comprehend it. I can’t understand what’s going on right now,” said a woman counterprotester outside a September AfD rally less than an hour from Berlin, who declined to be named for privacy reasons. Earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the streets to protest the rise of AfD, a trend that’s been especially concerning for the country given its Nazi history. “The AfD has no right to exist, the way they think and the hatred they stir up,” the counterprotester said.

Already, the party’s popularity — it has higher national support than Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats (SPD), for example — has influenced other political parties to consider much harsher immigration legislation at the federal level. If they did become part of a state or federal coalition with a mainstream party — especially as the majority partner — it would not only normalize the idea of AfD in government, it would push policymaking on issues like immigration and climate farther to the right.

Additionally, it would be seen as validating the xenophobia and antisemitism that AfD leaders have espoused, while emboldening voters who share these ideas to express them more openly.

“Currently, catastrophic politicians are in power. Something has to happen,” an AfD supporter in her 40s, who declined to be named for privacy reasons, said at the group’s September rally. “Everything is done for everyone else, but no longer for the population that lives here.”

Voters who backed AfD or were open to the party told Vox that their support was tied to protecting the Germany they know. That Germany, for many of the party’s supporters, is one that’s white, that relies on fossil fuels, that’s hostile toward more immigrants, and that’s adopted many of the same anti-LGBTQ positions that are common among conservatives in the US.

“You pay for others who come here and do not need welfare,” said the AfD supporter in her 40s who spoke with Vox at the Oranienburg rally.

The AfD, briefly explained

A relatively young political party, the AfD was born in 2013 after the financial crisis as a group that protested Germany’s efforts to economically bail out southern countries in the European Union.

Yet while its platform initially focused more on the economy, it seized on the issue of immigration following the 2015 refugee crisis, when Germany took in more than one million refugees from places including Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This was a roughly 1.2 percent increase to Germany’s population of 81 million people at the time — but it marked a stark jump in the number of refugees than the country had welcomed before.

In recent years, the party has both driven and capitalized on rising backlash toward refugees and immigration.

Since 2016, the federal government has established new centers to house and welcome asylum seekers across Germany, including in states in east Germany that have historically had less diversity. High inflation and energy costs have also exacerbated economic struggles that people have experienced in these regions, spurring some to blame immigrants for their problems even though they have nothing to do with them.

Tensions with newcomers, which flared in 2015, received new attention in 2022 and 2023 when Germany took in hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees who fled the war, and when migrants from other regions increased as well.

“What do you think as a German, if you need an apartment and then hear, there would be an apartment free but that is kept free for Ukrainians?” Mario asked. “Then I say to myself, thank you, Germany. I pay taxes but I don’t get an apartment.”

As part of its answer to addressing the rise in immigration, the AfD has increasingly embraced a xenophobic and anti-Muslim platform — due to the Middle Eastern origins of many earlier refugees — with the purported goal of preserving German identity and nationalism. “Islam does not belong to Germany,” reads the party’s 2016 manifesto. “Burkas? We’re more into bikinis,” read one AfD tagline from 2017. “Unser Land zuerst,” which translates to “Our country first!” adorned AFD campaign banners in 2022.

“The party has radicalized a lot since 2013,” Jakob Guhl, a researcher focused on the far right at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in Germany, told Vox. As it did, the party grew its base in the more socially conservative regions in eastern Germany, which has typically lagged other parts of the country economically as well.

The AfD’s current immigration platform marks a major departure from existing laws, which allow asylum seekers to enter the country and reside there while they await a decision on their immigration status. The party’s ideas include doing away with individual asylum hearings and setting up holding camps abroad that prevent people from entering Germany in the first place.

The AfD has also said it wants to cap immigration so much that there would be a net zero number of immigrants entering the country each year. Basically, by ramping up deportations while limiting new entrants, the party would hope to have no change in the country’s immigration population on an annual basis.

The AfD’s stance on immigration comes from two places, says Guhl: “There is both genuine xenophobia that they are tapping into, which [has] always existed and which they have mobilized. There is [also] discontent around the implementation of refugee policy and how local communities seem to be left alone and over-challenged with the scale of the issue.”

In addition to its focus on immigration, AfD has homed in on two other policy areas: climate change and Ukraine aid.

As Germany’s only political party that’s embraced climate change denial, AfD has capitalized on the discontent a fraction of voters feel toward existing environmental policies. Specifically, a law that requires many German residents to swap out their existing fossil fuel-based boilers for heat pumps that run on clean energy has raised many people’s ire due to how costly it could be for homeowners.

A May 2023 Allensbach poll found that as many as 80 percent of Germans were concerned about the decision to phase fossil fuel-based boilers out by this year — a timeline that’s now been extended.

AfD has said that it would back the ongoing use of fossil fuels for not just home boilers, but also the German economy writ large. “AFD said the government has no business in how people heat their homes. Their main message … on climate change [is] that we can just keep on living life as they have before. We have the right to pollute and the right to continue doing so,” says Endre Borbáth, a professor at the Institute of Political Science at Heidelberg University.

AfD has also embraced a pro-Russia position, and urged Germany to abstain from sending Ukraine more aid, a stance that both taps into the country’s commitment to pacifism after World War II, and the sympathies that some in eastern Germany still have with the Kremlin after the USSR’s control of the area following the conflict.

“What is going on here reminds me very, very much of the final phase of the German Democratic Republic. [German leaders] are only doing what Washington tells them to do. We are practically a vassal state of the US,” an older man who attended the AfD rally, and declined to be named for privacy reasons, told Vox.

A common thread across these policy positions and the party’s general branding is that AfD claims it’s defending some Germans’ existing way of life, and that it’s there to push back against any and all attempts to infringe on their rights, even the most mundane.

Last fall, for example, an AfD leader vehemently said she was defending people’s right to eat wienerschnitzel, a fried veal dish, as a greater proportion of the German population has embraced plant-based diets both for health and climate reasons.

“I won’t let anyone take my schnitzel away from me! No one touches my schnitzel,” said Alice Weidel, an AfD leader.

Why support for the AFD is surging

One of AfD’s largest bases of support is in eastern Germany, where elections will be held in the states of Brandenburg, Thuringia, and Saxony in September. Nationally, AfD has about 20 percent support, making it more popular than multiple center-left parties. And in the eastern states, it has upward of 30 percent support, making it the most popular of the five larger parties.

Such backing is directly linked to the party’s message that change is unnecessary: Residents in the east, in particular, are more likely than those in the west to feel left behind by those in power, and that life was easier before reunification. They’re also more likely to hold xenophobic views toward immigrants and raise questions about which residents are considered German enough.

While East Germany was an authoritarian state that famously built the Berlin Wall to prevent its residents from leaving, it also offered health care and educational programs that some residents welcomed. And after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many Germans in the east feel like policymakers don’t prioritize their needs as much as they do those in the west.

On average, economic outcomes and job opportunities are still worse in the east, a dynamic that has fostered resentment and critiques of those in power. Violence toward immigrants and attacks on refugee centers are also more common in eastern Germany, which in recent decades has had a more homogenous population than the west, and where immigrants are seen as competition for housing and jobs.

“Basically, the message is you don’t have to adapt, you don’t have to change your way of life, and what the government is doing is harmful,” says Borbáth.

AfD has also capitalized on growing frustration with the parties in power. Currently, the governing coalition of the Social Democratic Party, Free Democratic Party, and the Green Party, also known as the “traffic light coalition” because of the red, yellow, and green colors of their logos, has been criticized by those on the right and left for gridlock. The ruling coalition has hit very low approval ratings in recent months, with just 19 percent of all German voters in an August poll approving of their governance.

While the coalition partners all fall on the liberal side of the spectrum, they have fundamental differences on key issues. That’s led to internal dissent over subjects including tax cuts and climate reforms, leading to confusing, and often ineffective, policies like the heat pump bill that try — and fail — to please all coalition members and their voters.

“The federal government, the Ampel [traffic light], I would say is an absolute, total failure. And what applies in road traffic when the traffic light fails? Right before left,” Birgit Bessin, the head of the AfD’s Brandenburg chapter, told the crowd in Oranienburg.

Because it’s an opposition party, AfD can claim it can do better without actually having to deliver, and it’s made full use of this fact to garner support among dissatisfied voters even beyond its traditional power base in the east.

What the AFD’s rise would mean for Germany — and the EU

The impact AFD has already had offers a preview of what the group’s actual ascent to governance at national and state levels would mean.

Already, the prominence and resonance of the AfD’s anti-immigrant statements have spurred other parties to adopt more hardline positions and similarly aggressive rhetoric. For example, this year, even Scholz’s center-left coalition has backed policies that make it easier to expedite the deportation of failed asylum seekers. That marks a stark difference from former chancellor and Christian Democratic Union leader Angela Merkel’s leadership on the subject.

Anti-immigrant sentiment is part of a larger trend in the EU, as countries across the board, including Greece and Italy, have seen increased migration from countries in Africa and the Middle East amid military conflict and economic challenges. European Union refugee numbers haven’t matched 2015 levels, a peak driven by the Syrian civil war, but they have increased to 1.1 million asylum requests in 2023 — a big jump from the previous year.

If Germany were to come under AfD control, or the control of a coalition featuring the AfD as a key partner, that could be devastating for refugees and those seeking asylum not just in the country, but throughout the EU, since it’s been one of the regional leaders on these policies. Germany has accounted for a large proportion of refugee resettlements in the EU and, as one of its most prominent members, has a significant role in setting the tone for the bloc’s proposals.

Domestically, localities where AFD has obtained some semblance of power also offer a small preview of what the party’s impact could be. In Sonneberg, an east German county that elected an AfD administrator for the first time in the country’s history, expressing extremist opinions has become more common, the German publication taz reports. “The AfD victory gave the right-wing extremists from Sonneberg a foothold in the center of society,” Marcel Rocho, the owner of a local bar, told taz. “You are now sitting at the table.”

In other states where AfD is gaining local power, mainstream leaders are also increasingly finding themselves having to rely on their votes: In the eastern state of Thuringia, the CDU partnered with AfD to pass a tax cut in fall 2023.

This year’s elections could accelerate that integration.

Experts are also watching whether AfD grows its federal presence in Germany’s national elections in 2025, with state leaders potentially paving the way for more collaboration at the federal level. While Germany’s major parties, including the SPD and CDU, have rejected partnering with AfD to govern nationally, the head of the CDU, Friedrich Merz, has gotten flak for being open to working with the party at the local level (a position he had to walk back after backlash).

“The way these radical right parties become acceptable is by entering into coalitions with these mainstream parties,” says Borbáth.

Germany is unique in that it has imposed legal safeguards aimed at preventing extremist parties from gaining power, including allowing the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a designated government body that seeks to combat anti-democratic actions, to declare such parties unconstitutional. These policies were put in place following the rise of the Nazis in a bid to prevent the horrors of the Holocaust from ever happening again.

Some experts have wondered whether this designation should be levied against AfD, though there are worries that doing so could be considered anti-democratic given how much support the party has picked up.

Already, a regional chapter of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has classified the Saxony-Anhalt AfD as a right-wing extremist group due to its Islamophobic and antisemitic statements at the local level. And similarly, German courts have ruled that Bjorn Hocke, the head of AfD’s Thuringia branch, can be called a fascist for his anti-democratic views and attacks on Holocaust remembrance.

In lieu of a formal declaration, lawmakers and residents have been vocal about how dangerous the party is, especially after news dropped of a bombshell meeting party members had with neo-Nazis to discuss a mass deportation proposal for immigrants.

“Things like fascism, a Führer, nationalism, no strangers allowed in, that doesn’t lead to anything good. We as grannies say we have memories of how it was. And please, please, listen to us,” says Cordula, an 80-year-old German woman born during World War II, who is a member of the Omas Gegen Rechts, which translates to Grandmas Against the Right.