Between Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally, populists continue to rise in Europe’s most powerful countries.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has become the most popular party in the country, according to a striking new poll published Tuesday.
If a national election were now held, 26 percent of Germans would vote for the AfD, according to a poll carried out by the Forsa Institute for Social Research and Statistical Analysis. That result puts the far-right party ahead of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s mainstream conservative bloc, which slid to second with 24 percent support in the poll.
With the far-right National Rally already leading clearly in France, the bombshell German survey is likely to fuel unease among mainstream leaders across Europe. Right-wing populist parties have performed strongly in elections in recent years from Poland to Romania, and Portugal to the Netherlands.
In Britain, Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK is also topping polls amid broad public dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government.
While POLITICO’s Poll of Polls shows that Germany’s conservative Christian Democrats maintain a slight lead over the AfD in an aggregation of voter surveys, the far-right party has climbed since snagging almost 21 percent of the vote in February’s federal election, its best-ever result. The AfD is now the largest opposition party in Germany’s Bundestag.
The AfD was initially founded as a single-issue party more than a decade ago by a group of economics professors who, in the midst of Europe’s debt crisis, opposed the euro and financial help for debt-ridden countries. It regularly scored single-digit results in federal and state elections in its early years.
Now led by the openly radical Alice Weidel, a former economist, the AfD currently pushes a hard-line anti-migrant and right-wing populist positions. Some mainstream politicians argue the party is so extreme that it ought to be banned under provisions of the German constitution designed to prevent a repeat of the country’s Nazi past.
Source : https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-far-right-afd-lead-survey/
