The AfD can boast of stability.

While the Union, SPD, Greens and FDP are going up and down in the polls, the right-wing party has been at eleven percent for months - and thus below the 12.6 percent it reached in 2017.

In the election campaign, the AfD, which, in the words of its parliamentary group leader Alexander Gauland, ran four years ago with the threat of chasing down the other parties, hardly played a role.

Markus Wehner

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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The refugee issue, to which it owed its success at the time, hardly took off. And the corona pandemic was not a winner either. Many within the AfD find government policy on this matter more or less appropriate. The lateral thinker movement is also very heterogeneous and extends to the Greens' camp, it did not allow itself to be co-opted by the AfD. However, the AfD has not discovered a new hot topic for itself. Nevertheless, the party has probably the most loyal base electorate, probably in the nine to ten percent range. That is around five million citizens. The rather mild election campaign led by the top duo Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel seemed to have been made for them alone.

However, many AfD politicians do not want to accept this strategy.

“We cannot be satisfied with what we have achieved.

The AfD has to concentrate even more on attracting new middle-class groups of voters and retaining them permanently, ”says the Berlin parliamentary group leader Georg Pazderski, who wants to win a seat in the Bundestag.

The fact that the AfD is stagnating in the polls is also due to the fact that many voters have not yet seen the party as a possible coalition partner and have no chance of co-governing.

“That is why we must do everything we can in the coming years to change that,” demands Pazderski, who has been promoting alliances with the CDU and FDP at an early stage, but so far unsuccessfully.

Björn Höcke's ambitions

As in previous state elections, the AfD will probably pass its return to the Bundestag as evidence that the party has consolidated and is no longer a pure protest party. In addition, according to the surveys, it will again become the strongest party in Saxony, and that can also succeed in Thuringia. The AfD is unlikely to gain any votes there compared to the previous federal election. The weakness of the CDU, which, for example, left the AfD clearly behind in the 2019 state elections in Saxony, now makes this possible. Four direct mandates for the AfD are very likely in Saxony, says Matthias Moehl from the internet platform election.de, which creates constituency forecasts. Another ten direct mandates can be reached - all in the eastern countries.

The regional associations there, the majority of which are classified as right-wing extremist by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, could see this as evidence that the AfD in the East shows how elections can be won with a radical course. Proponents of a more moderate course hold against it. Pazderski says: "The AfD is particularly successful in the East because the people there have significantly less fear of contact with us." The aim must be to gain the same level of acceptance in the West as in the new federal states. “But that can only be done with a bourgeois course.” In the party, however, there is speculation that Björn Höcke, Thuringian head of state and front man of the officially disbanded “wing”, is striving to join the federal executive committee at the next party congress - not as a national spokesman, like the chairman at the AfD means, but as an assessor.In the West, many AfD politicians see Höcke's ambitions with stomach ache, as the far right is considered a toxic person for the bourgeois-conservative voter potential that is to be won.