Alice Weidel vs Frank-Walter Steinmeier: Comparing Two Political Leaders

Alternative for Germany

Alternative for Germany began in 2013 as a Eurosceptic protest against eurozone bailouts but quickly transformed into Germany's main far-right party. The anti-euro professors and market liberals who founded it were displaced by a harder nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-establishment current whose strongest bases emerged in eastern Germany after the 2015 refugee crisis. Its rise has destabilized the party system not because it governs, but because every other major party has had to reorganize strategy around the question of how to isolate or confront it.