"BERLIN -- For Germans browsing social media in recent months, one political party was tough to avoid.
The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which wants to pull Germany out of the European Union and fly immigrants back to their home countries, dominated online channels in the run-up to Sunday's federal election, according to Unicepta, an independent research firm based in Cologne, Germany.
Social-media users responded to AfD messaging 17.5 million times between Jan. 1 and Feb. 17 on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X, the most of any party and more than the center-right Christian Democratic Union and center-left Social Democratic Party combined, according to the firm.
Researchers said this blanket exposure might be one of the reasons for the AfD's stellar performance at the ballot, where it doubled its share of the votes, scored the biggest gains of all parties, and finished first in many socio-economic groups, including taxpayers, voters under 50 and blue-collar workers.
In a country where one-third of people now receive their news via social media, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, parties that can harness these platforms have a huge advantage in shaping public opinion.
"If you make a new TikTok account, you have to scroll through five or six AfD content clips. There is sometimes 400 times more AfD content" than that of the other parties, said Rudiger Maas, founder of the Institute for Generational Research, a think tank in Augsburg, Germany. Any German spending 90 minutes on social media might be seeing AfD messaging for two-thirds of this time, Maas said.
Slick and combative videos, pushed through an ecosystem of party officials and independent influencers, drove millions more views than any other party, spilling into popular TV talk shows and helping to shape Germany's public debate around immigration and free speech.
The AfD's online campaign leveraged its status as a troublesome upstart, founded in 2013 to oppose the economic policies of former Chancellor Angela Merkel. It has opened up new classes of voters beyond the party's traditional base among working-class East German men.
AfD leaders typically publish extracts from heated debates or speeches, while grassroots influencers focus on emotional diatribes against terrorist attacks in Germany, decry supposed constraints on free speech, or pull polemical stunts, often at the expense of left-wing activists.
"It's a 'breaking out of the Matrix' feeling," said Naomi Seibt, a 24-year-old German living in the U.S. Seibt posts videos skewering Berlin's immigration and German speech laws to hundreds of thousands of followers on X.
"In Germany everything is very traditionalist. . .very conformist. They don't want to step out of line," Seibt said.
Seibt said she isn't paid by the AfD, and only connected with party leaders after helping to connect them with Elon Musk last year. "The truth is, the AfD is a bit disorganized on social media," she said.
Nevertheless, 55% of young German voters said the AfD does the best job of reaching young voters via social media, with the Green party trailing in second place at 14%, according to a recent study by Maas's Institute.
The AfD tripled its vote share among voters aged 18-24 over the weekend compared with the 2021 election, to 21% from 7%.
It roughly doubled its share among voters aged 25-44, to around 25%, according to Infratest dimap.
A broader voter base sets the party up for further gains at the ballot box.
The AfD's social-media campaign "is very strategic, and you have to say that it works," said Jorg Muller-Lietzkow, a board member and spokesman for cnetz, an association for network policy that is close to the conservative CDU party. "There is no good answer right now from the traditional parties."" [1]
Or should we just admit that the AfD’s freedom-seeking ideas resonate better with young voters?
1. World News: Germany's AfD Harnessed Social Media to Win Votes. Fairless, Tom. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 27 Feb 2025: A9.
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