As a German, I have absolutely no fucking idea why the AfD is gaining traction right now of all times. Its platform is anti-immigration and also anti-progressivism, which the new government has been doing a bit of, but not much. Maybe it is because there's been a lot of hostility between the coalition's parties, but that doesn't really explain it either.

They are far right enough that courts and prosecutors have decided repeatedly that one of their main leaders can be publicly called a fascist and a nazi because it is based on facts and a permissible „value judgement“. This is rather exceptional, as things like that are usually taken very seriously here as an insult and can cost you hundreds or thousands of Euros.

Here is what one prosecutor had to say (translated):

Against the background that the person concerned, according to general opinion, belongs to the extreme right-wing fringe of his party, has expressed himself in recent years, as evidenced by a large number of press publications, in a clearly nationalistic-folkish manner with racist overtones and emphasising a natural claim to leadership of the Germans, and in doing so has repeatedly used formulations that belonged to the standard vocabulary of the representatives of National Socialism before May 1945…

There are moderates in the AfD, but they are increasingly silenced or leaving. And in that case „moderate“ means not demanding that migrants be shot at the border, not defending holocaust deniers, not attending concerts where the hitler salute is shown, not conniving with Reichsbürger (our own mad version of „sovereign citizens“), not calling for the death of government officials, politicians or doctors …

The turn to the right in Germany have a lot to do with the state of the media in Germany.

Far-right groups have sucessfully established isolated media channels on various platforms, among them Telegram and YouTube, but also on Facebook and Twitter, with very little coherence to other media and the actual state of things. Its output is achieved by informally and ideologically recruiting laypersons as influencers who constantly create content which acts as a sort of pyramid scheme of attention, thus self-replicating.

The content also appears on the feeds of already right-wing journalists of very popular and sensationalist newspapers of the Axel-Springer-Verlag (very sketchy and influential publisher) with half a century of experience manipulating the German political landscape.

For additional context it is also necessary to consider that yesterday (Sunday, 2023-10-08) there were elections in two German states, one of which (Bayern) has a history of being more right-wing and religious than the other West-German states.

I would say a lot of people in Germany are feeling left out/alone with their problems.

It's been like this for at least 10, if not 20 or more years.

Most stuff is lobby and economy driven and we're getting nowhere.

In came the afd offering easy solutions and appealing to the public (never mind their program stating completely otherwise) so I guess it gave people the feeling of someone doing something and caring for them.

And if not, pissing off the rest of the politicians.

At least the latter is working.

I do not support or condone this behaviour but it is not that hard to read.

And instead of approaching the real current issues (inflation, money issues, buerocracy, environment) directly most parties even try to move further right, to get the afd voters back, which is the worst they could do.

It's pretty much just immigration. There's some other topics but in all the polls done they absolutely dwarf compared to people not wanting "immigrants" (this includes refugees, including those from Ukraine for example, since those people are deep into Russian propaganda).

That being said, the headline and statement made here by the Guardian is absolute rubbish.