Hitler’s Nazi party was a party for the youth. By 1933, over 40% of all Nazi party members were between 21 and 30 years old. While those over 60 were a meagre 3.6%. Today’s neo-fascism is replicating this. Germany’s neo-fascist political party – the AfD – is attracting scores of young people. 

Already in the year 2018, CDU-boss and arch-conservative Friedrich Merz declared, the AfD are Nazis. And more recently, regional CDU leader of North-Rhine-Westphalia, state premier Hendrik Wüst (CDU) said, this is a Nazi party. 

Beyond all, there are two court decisions. One justifies to call the AfD’s most powerful Führer – Björn Höcke – a Nazi. With the second court ruling, party deputy – the powerless pretty face of fascism and Swiss resident – Alice Weidel was called a Nazi Schlampe – Nazi bitch. Today, it is not illegal to call her that.

In January 2024 and for cosmetic reason, Weidel was forced to fire one of her closest advisors. Weidel’s bedfellow – Roland Hartwig – had taken part in a secret Neo-Nazi “Wannsee 2.0” meeting that planned the forced elimination of anyone non-Aryan from Germany.

While Höcke and Weidel are old, rafts of AfD’s supporters are of a young age. With this support, the AfD has become the largest and most important right-wing extremist party. Today, the AfD is represented in almost all regional parliaments. It sits in Germany’s federal parliament and is set to win big time in the upcoming elections in three East-German states where roughly one-third of all voters are set to vote for the AfD.

Meanwhile, the AfD runs state funded offices, information booths, anti-democratic rallies and campaigns. The party also performs well in West German states with between 15% and 20% of voters’ support. Albeit it is not as strong as in the former East-Germany with above 30%.

Initially founded as a staunchly neoliberal free market and anti-Europe party, the AfD has replicated Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives in 2022 – even though nobody was killed apart from a few character assassinations. 

This eliminated the party’s last moderates. The ideological cleansing of the party came in the East-Germany city of Riesa. The AfD’s 2022 party congress eradicated the neoliberals and severely weakened the party’s conservative-reactionary wing.

Simultaneously, Riesa 2022 strengthened the völkische (read: Neo-Nazis) forces within the party. And they prevailed. By 2023, the big fights between neoliberals, conservatives, and right-wing extremists ended. After that, inner-party disputes largely centred around party candidates to be elected. 

Meanwhile and like its ideological predecessor, the AfD, too, has a youth association. No longer called Hitler Youth (HJ), but JA for Junge Alternative or Young Alternative. The JA’s logo are the burning flames of a 1988 founded Neo-Nazi commando called Nationale Sammlung (national grouping). And it was originally used by Neo-Nazis group that was originally set up by the Holocaust denier and anti-Semitic Neo-Nazi Führer Michael Kühnen.

For years, Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution (federal intelligence agency) has been monitoring the JA. Concurrently, its state-based subsidiaries in East-Germany’s Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt also monitor local AfD organisations and the JA. It is believed that the AfD – and even more so, the JA – have so-called right-wing extremist aspirations (read: eliminating Germany’s democracy and constitutional political system). 

Surprisingly, this has not led to any kind of political isolation for the AfD – on the contrary. Worse, the neo-fascist AfD has gained votes in last year’s election. A whopping 18.4% of the voters in Hessen’s state elections voted for the AfD. At the election in Bavaria, it was still 14.6%. 

By early 2024, German-wide polls saw the AfD sitting at about 22%. In other words, the AfD is Germany’s second strongest party outshining all other political parties with the exception of the conservative CDU. 

Worse, in virtually almost all of East German states, the AfD is the strongest political party with approval ratings hovering above 30%. Even more problematic is the fact that in the East-German state of Saxony, the AfD’s competition comes from an even more outspoken Neo-Nazi platoon called Free Saxony. 

In the north German city of Bremen, it is the so-called Bürger in Wut that compete with the AfD. Meanwhile, in Bavaria, it is the euphemistically labelled Free Voters with Hubert Aiwanger as its mini-Führer. He once (late 1980s) wanted to gas Jews.

Even at council levels, the AfD has achieved several stunning successes. In June 2023, in East-Germany’s Sonneberg (Thuringia), locals elected the first right-wing extremist representative to the local district council. Just one week later, the AfD won in Raguhn-Jeßnitz – and for the first time in Germany – it got a full-time mayor.

One of the key problems lies in the fact that representatives of Germany’s democratic parties – especially among Germany’s conservative CDU – have tended to downplay the AfD. What has also been downplayed is the success of the AfD, that is all too often linked to its sophisticated use of online platforms. 

The AfD has also been highly effective in reaching out to young voters. For that, the AfD uses the youth online platform TikTok.

Unlike all other political parties, the AfD’s TikTok propaganda tends to receive up to 18 million likes. While all major parties are active on TikTok, the AfD is – by far – the strongest force on TikTok. 

The AfD’s right-wing populism, its manpower – often financed by the state where the AfD sends its people into Germany’s parliaments – and its strategic attention to online networking makes this success possible. Today, the AfD is Germany’s only true social media party. The Facebook wonder, as some see it.

At least partly, the success of the AfD among young voters can be explained by the fact that members of the Young Alternative, young supporters, and Germany’s youth in general, are using online platforms. They watch Tiktok where short and crisp TikTok videos present the AfD as being cool.

When, for example, the aforementioned Alice Weidel screams in Germany’s parliament (Bundestag) and vigorously agitates against, for example, the welfare state, calling it stupid and a magnet for immigrants, it is done, not to engage in a debate or to make a constructive contribution. Rather, it is done for sound bites. Speeches, i.e. shouting matches, are presented to be cut up into handy 30-second propaganda videos for TikTok.

These short online videos are watched by almost 5 million people often receiving up to 150,000 “likes”. It is one of many ways that support the AfD’s propaganda strategy to target young voters. Virtually all of the AfD’s hate speeches and right-wing propaganda can be found on the Tiktok platform. 

With its hyper-active right-wing online presence, the party has also woven a network of young influencers shaping (read: manipulating) a large community of young people while also corralling potential voters. 

Currently, TikTok has over a billion monthly users who like, comment on, and upload short videos. 21 million of them live in Germany. The App is especially popular with minors and young people, and it offers a vast array of different contents. Not just juvenile trends are set here, contacts are also established, and opinions are exchanged. 

TikTok is the online door that opens up the pool for young voters. And the AfD has realised this like no other political party in Germany.

Beyond all that, the Chinese App is also considered a security risk because of its documentation of user behaviours – just like many other online platforms do. Yet, in the case of TikTok, the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China can request data from the company at any time. In the USA, and several institutions of the European Union, the App is banned on government mobile phones. Perhaps the former boss of the French government – Napoleon – wasn’t entirely off the mark when saying,

he who has the youth has the future.

Tellingly, it became the principle that Germany’s Nazis of the 1930s also followed. To have the youth manipulating it comes almost as a second nature to far right propagandist. The AfD seems to have realised this too. Unlike Germany’s democratic parties, the AfD has become “the” leading force on Tiktok. 

Today, six of the ten of the most successful German politicians’ Tiktok accounts belong to the AfD. How far ahead the AfD is can be shown by the number of ‘likes’  for example, during the month of October 2023:

• The AfD had 17.75 million Tiktok likes; 
• Germany’s progressives – Die Linke – had six million;
• The neoliberal FDP had 1.7 million;
• The conservative CDU had 914,000;
• The social-democratic SPD had a meagre 289,000; and the 
• Environmentalist The Greens had just 191,000

With numbers like these, no wonder the AfD is one of the most popular political parties among young voters in Germany. In terms of online followers, the AfD also dominates. 

On a good day, the AfD has almost 18 million likes. When Germany’s democratic parties – the conservative CDU, the social-democratic SPD, the neoliberal FDP, the environmentalist Greens, and the socialist Die Linke – are put together, they barely reach half of what the AfD can muster in terms of online engagement.

Yet, the success is not only to be found in numbers alone. The popularity of the AfD among Germany’s youth is also related to its appearance and the fact that it presents itself as being authentic. The AfD successfully pretends to act against the mainstream. Simultaneously, it sells right-wing populists propaganda. 

Unlike many 12 and 15 year olds, AfD politicians do not dance in front of the camera, they do not follow current trends, and they do not try to be a superficial figure. Yet, many of them often appear surprisingly conservative, boring, stuffy, narrow-minded, and petit bourgeois. Still, their targeted messaging hits a nerve among Germany’s youth.

The AfD’s online propaganda targeting young people also helped its recent successes. The AfD goes from electoral success to electoral success. The outcome of the party’s propaganda barrage hitting Germany’s youth is that the AfD is astonishingly popular with young voters. 

While neglecting online engagement, and in particular TikTok, Germany’s democratic parties are still wondering why the AfD is so successful with young people. Put simply, they have failed in their political communication with Germany’s youth. Germany’s democratic political parties lag behind the AfD when it comes to the use of online platforms. 

The AfD’s non-mainstream, pretend-to-be-radical, and soberly presented messages tell its audience what they want to hear. Simultaneously, it influences or better manipulates Germany’s youth towards right-wing ideologies. Yet, 2024 is no longer 1934.

The AfD no longer marches in brown shirts, no longer beats the drums, no longer sleeps in Nazi youth camps, and no longer carries torches at night. Today, it is TikTok that corrals the youth energising young people to vote for AfD. 

In short, the successes of the AfD’s online communication strategy shows that it knows how to reach Germany’s young people and it exploits this rather ruthlessly.

On the AfD’s TikTok account, politics is sensationalised and reduced to simple slogans. For example, the faceless and powerless AfD admin-boss is framed as: “Chrupalla hits out against useless university students!”. The boring MBA Weidel is framed as:“Alice Weidel strikes again!” Yet, this always comes with an exclamation mark! The sensationalised TikTok videos are not restricted to the abuse of parliamentarian privileges.

In Germany’s much loved TV talk shows, for example, AfD appearances are also used for TikTok. AfD politicians produce pre-conceptualised and highly cardio graphed sound bites that are designed to be used on TikTok.

While democratic politicians seek to engage with AfD politicians in the misguided belief that the AfD is interested in a constructive debate, AfD politicians have something completely different in mind: right-wing propaganda is made user-friendly through short, sharp, and above all, emotionally charged slogans ready to be converted into TikTok videos.

Deceptively, the AfD claims to be a democratic force standing by the rule of law, open debate, and supposedly democratic engagement. While Germany’s democratic political parties fall for it (again), the AfD’s propaganda strategy follows Joseph Goebbels’ proven strategy when he said,

“we [the Nazis] are entering the Reichstag in order that we may arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy from its arsenal. We shall become Reichstag deputies in order that the Weimar ideology should itself help us to destroy it”. 

It worked once – so why not try it again! Just this time around, it works through online platforms and in particular, on TikTok where the AfD is spreading its right-wing propaganda – often with little context or content. 

It has learned from marketing. What counts is not the truth but to sell a product, an idea, a service, or an ideology. In some instances, political advertising operates surprisingly similar to marketing. 

Neither marketing nor politics is about an open debate and truth telling. Instead, success is achieved by selling your product (marketing) or your ideology (politics). The AfD is very good in peddling its far right ideology. On that, the AfD is way ahead of any other political party.

As a consequence, the AfD’s TikTok videos do not focus on democratic debates. Overwhelmingly, AfD videos focus on hype, sensations, emotions, and on polarization. And for that reason, many speeches done by AfD politicians reflect that. 

By contrast, Germany’s democratic parties have failed to realise the potentials of online platforms to reach young voters. In fact, many if not most speeches and parliamentary contributions made by the AfD are specifically written to be used on TikTok.

In other words, Germany’s democratic political parties follow an outlived media strategy – political engagement. For the enemy of democracy, this is not the point. The point is to manipulate the youth to destroy democracy.

Therefore, the way AfD speeches are structured is not to convince others but as a way to escalate and to heckle other parties. For the AfD, it is propaganda and ideological manipulation while content is largely irrelevant. However, for Germany’s democratic political parties, it is the content. 

The focus is on hyped-up polemical content – not democratic engagement. The AfD has been successful in manipulating young people. Worse, the AfD makes young people feel to be taken seriously. Virtually all of this occurs via online platforms that operate with algorithms. Sensationalism and populism are good for TikTok’s algorithms. It has two great advantages for the AfD:

1. This allows the AfD to reduce the complexity of democratic politics to handy slogans; and,
2. online algorithms push sensationalised messages upward and increase their popularity and reach.

It appears as if Germany’s democratic parties have locked themselves into a losing position. They are still trying to communicate their points of view in a dry and boring but very factual way. This is not a way to reach Germany’s youth. To make matters worse, these political parties are avoiding exactly those online platforms at which Germany’s youth is represented. It is a strategy set up for failure.

For years, Germany’s democratic political parties have completely missed what is happening. Unsurprisingly, these democratic parties are in eternal decline among many of Germany’s young voters. Meanwhile, the AfD goes from triumph to triumph.

The use of online platforms remains core to the AfD’s media strategy, however it has to be acknowledged that all this cannot only be the work of Tik Tok.  Nevertheless, this is what makes the AfD successful on Tiktok, among the youth, and in Germany. On TikTok, the AfD:

• slanders refugees;
• triggers violence;
• declares progressives to be the enemy; and,
• presents what is euphemistically called “ethno-pluralism” – racism with a hefty dose of the Aryan Volksgemeinschaft – to be the answer for almost anything. 

The tools of the AfD are exaggeration, hyperbole, embellishment, dramatization, hate speech, abuse, attacks, personal assaults, and so on. It also uses sensationalism and carefully staged attacks to gain attention on Tiktok. This is easy for right-wing populist parties and its right-wing extremist politicians. 

Yet, this is also where technology meets ideology. It coincides with the communication algorithms of online platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Tiktok, and Twitter.

Beyond all this, the AfD can spread its right-wing ideology so well because of its personal appearances. Unlike Germany’s democratic political parties, the AfD has much more manpower assigned to online propaganda.

It has systematically hired people from right-wing organisations with experiences in digital communication. As a consequence, the AfD is much more active and better organised compared to Germany’s democratic political parties.

Unsurprisingly, the parliamentary group of the AfD – alone! – has 50 Tiktok accounts. No other political party can muster that. The online accounts of the AfD also dominate with the number of followers and now stands at over 360,000. 

From the AfD’s point of view, its strong online record is not only due to the party’s manpower. It is also because of the reproduction of its online propaganda by other accounts. These accounts – which are all too often, not operated by the AfD – often repost AfD online videos thousands of times. In some cases, this means that TikTok videos are spreading with greater success than the original TikTok version.

To aid the process of broadcasting right-wing propaganda, some AfD online accounts even have a “clearance” directive built in. This enables people to download and share all those videos with others. This reprocessing leads to a significant increase in reach. 

In other cases, AfD’s TikTok propaganda videos and “blue” hearts – blue is the self-assigned colour of the AfD – are often accompanied by, “sei schlau’ – wähl’ blau” [be smart, vote blue]. These so-called third-party accounts are important for the AfD because the AfD can pretend that others and not the AfD itself distributes their ideology to a wider audience.

All in all, the flood of right-wing propaganda via online accounts with AfD in the name or in an online profile, makes it difficult to differentiate between official AfD party posts and those reposted by AfD sympathizers. 

As a first step towards radicalization, it seems to be far easier to fall for right-wing propaganda when online spaces are flooded by omnipresent offerings from the AfD. With that, the AfD creates the appearance of being bigger and more important than it actually is. 

A good example of this are the videos of the extremely right-wing, völkisch-nationalist (read: Neo-Nazi), Islamophobic, xenophobic, anti-constitutional (read: anti-democratic) Maximilian Krah. Krah is the AfD’s top candidate for the upcoming European elections. In his right-wing propaganda videos, he presents classic right-wing populism:

• “the politicians are afraid of the people” [das Volk];
• “be afraid of the left teacher”; and Germany’s public broadcasters
• “ARD and ZDF are left-wing propaganda tools”. 

The real danger of Krah is that – because of his success on Tiktok – he tends to lead his audience away from his or AfD sites and online channels ushering them into outright Neo-Nazi platforms. Petit-bourgeois-looking Krah’s own YouTube channels and sites are like “politikvonrechts.de” – politics from the right. 

On this platform, one finds his “manifesto for the AfD”, while advertising for right-wing extremist books of the neo-fascist Antaios Verlag. This publisher is run by right-wing extremist Götz Kubitschek who, in turn, operates in cahoots with Austrian race-extermination specialist Martin Sellner.

The radicalization via AfD-external online sites is by no means a coincidence. It is a common tactic of right-wing propaganda. It aids the false appearance to “communicate” in a comparatively moderate manner in public spaces. The strategy behind this is to attract unassuming and non-political people in order to corral them into the rather closed environment of Neo-Nazi filter bubbles. 

Beyond that, AfD-related online portals also seek to give the impression of seriousness, of being cool, of being trendy, and of being significant and important. Yet, a closer look at these online sites reveals that a large number of participants and presenters are from the AfD itself or are closely linked right-wing extremists and adjacent Neo-Nazis. In short, it is a relatively small group of people presenting themselves as being all important.

One of the key manipulators of the AfD is the right-wing influencer, anti-vaxxer, “gun nuts”, and QAnon believer Carolin Matthie. Semi-Neo-Nazi Matthie is just one of many right-wing influencers who are part of the AfD’s far-reaching online network. Today, this includes virtually all social media online platforms.

Beyond all this, Tiktok – at least in theory – is concerned with preventing populism and far right content. As a matter of fact, the platform primarily offers simple entertainment. It sometimes even deletes overtly political videos. It is not impossible that, if the AfD says something that is all too obvious and too direct against Germany’s constitution (the Basic Law), Tiktok will delete it relatively quickly.

TikTok knows that far right propaganda could massively damage its business model if it turns out that TikTok is a right-wing extremist network. For example, TikTok once deleted an official AfD party account (May 2022). Deleting a prominent account may seem like a big blow to the AfD at first glance. But it had little effect because of the fact that so many AfD stooges, AfD-parliamentarians, and far right third-party accounts can rapidly compensate for that.

By far worse is the fact that Germany’s democratic parties have neglected – and even more dangerous: continue to neglect – TikTok. As a consequence, Germany’s democratic parties have left the field of online communication to young people of the AfD. In short, the AfD is at an advantage and free to attract young people. In the AfD’s strategy, this is a target group.

Because of its multiple online presence, the AfD – paradoxically – doesn’t even need a single central AfD account anymore. This is because the AfD works via rafts of personal brands, individual online accounts, separate online channels, and private online postings. With this strategy, the party is spinning an extremely successful far right web across all (read: all!) social media platforms.

Germany’s democratic parties have – so far – left a decisive part of Germany’s political future to the right-wing AfD, its far right propaganda, and its Neo-Nazi ideology.

Thomas Klikauer is the author of a book on “the AfD” and numerous publications on the AfD and right-wing extremism.

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