Shifting targets, growing support: The rise of Germany's AfD

By Thomas Escritt

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's domestic security agency classified the Alternative for Germany (AfD) as "extremist" on Friday, allowing for closer monitoring of the country's largest opposition party, which condemned the move as a "blow against democracy".

Here is a timeline for the AfD, Germany's most successful far-right party since World War Two.

2013

February 6 - Founded by right-wing economists, the party opposes Germany helping to bail out Greece at the height of the eurozone debt crisis, rejecting then-Chancellor Angela Merkel's assertion that there was "no alternative".

Headed by Bernd Lucke and Frauke Petry, the party grows quickly, fuelled by ample donations from small businesses and attracting disillusioned conservative and neoliberal politicians and voters.

September 22 - It narrowly misses the 5% threshold for winning seats in that year's parliamentary election

2014

May 25 - The party wins 7% in European Parliament elections, allowing it to send seven members to Brussels.

Though nativist overtones are never far from the surface, the party denies any racist motivation for its opposition to bailing out Greece and other heavily indebted countries.

August - A string of regional election victories in eastern Germany fuels the AfD's move further to the right, and Bjoern Hoecke, the party's nativist leader in the state of Thuringia, becomes one its most emblematic figures.

2015

The refugee crisis sees more than one million, mostly Muslim migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa arrive in Germany, propelling the AfD's nativist wing to the fore and giving the party a toehold in western Germany.

2016

March 13 - The AfD scores double-digit results in west German regional elections for the first time and wins nearly a quarter of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt - at the time the best result ever for a far-right party.

2017

January - Hoecke achieves notoriety for describing Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame". A court overrules Petry's attempts to kick him out of the party the following year.

January 21 - The party's growing prominence is signalled by its presence at an international gathering of far-right politicians in Koblenz, where Petry rubs shoulders with France's Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands' Geert Wilders.

September - Petry is ousted, in a defeat for the economic libertarian wing of the party, and is replaced by Alice Weidel, who leads the party to this day, and Alexander Gauland, a right-wing former Christian Democrat.

September 24 - The party wins 12.6% in Germany's federal election, entering the national parliament for the first time and becoming the largest opposition party.

2019

January 15 - The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) places the AfD under examination, and labels The Wing - a nativist grouping within the party led by Hoecke - and the party's youth wings as suspected far-right cases.

2020

April 30 - The Wing is dissolved.

2021

January 20 - The AfD mounts a legal challenge against being classified as a suspect far-right case.

February 25 - The BfV confirms the party is suspected far-right.

September 26 - Partly as a result of growing concerns about the cluster of far-right figures at the top of the party, and partly thanks to a buoyant economy, the party falls to 10.3% in the parliamentary election.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the slowing economy subsequently give the party a boost, and it also benefits from infighting in Chancellor Olaf Scholz's unwieldy three-way coalition.

Leaning heavily into culture war issues with demands for enquiries into alleged mishandling of the pandemic, critiques of modern architecture or rejection of supposed "gender ideologies", the party is able to secure and expand its base.

2022

April 5 - The party's youth wing is declared officially right extremist.

2024

January - A series of scandals - a bombshell report that senior figures had discussed deporting citizens of non-German ethnicity, the discovery of an alleged Chinese spy in one politician's office, and allegations that another had taken money from pro-Russian propaganda outlets - sparks months of protests but fails to sustainably dent support.

Increasingly, the party relies on a strategy of attempting to gum up government, peppering courts and ministries with filings and questions that critics regard as frivolous, in a way that seems designed to slow and discredit the state.

Hoecke is the leading champion of this strategy, deploying slogans that resemble those used by Adolf Hitler's Nazis in a manner guaranteed to command attention.

May 13 - A court rules that the classification as suspected far-right - one step short of Friday's confirmed far-right classification - is justified. The party had called members from ethnic minorities to testify that it was not.

May 22 - Le Pen distances herself from the AfD after Maximilian Krah, one of its most popular figures, fails to condemn Hitler's paramiltary SS in a newspaper interview.

2024

September 1 - The party becomes the first far-right party to top a regional election since World War Two.

2025

January - Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla and adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, interviews AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, declaring weeks ahead of a federal election: "Only the AfD can save Germany."

February 23 - The AfD comes second in the federal election, the best result for a far-right party since the German Federal Republic's founding.

March 31 - The party's youth wing is dissolved to make way for a replacement under closer supervision of party headquarters.

(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Gareth Jones)