Germany’s far-right party, the AfD, has recently opted for the country to remove its support for Ukraine. This comes almost a week after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz travelled to Kyiv to announce a €1.3 billion German aid package towards military and energy support for Ukraine. Merz’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, is a centre-right party, but it could not be further at odds with the AfD over this matter. The political divide in Germany has always been present, but at this time it seems wider than ever before.
Many experts are left wondering why, but they still attempt to find a reason for this gap.
“A lot of what’s happening in Germany has already happened here,” said Barbara Nagel, a professor in the German department at Princeton who grew up in Northeim, Lower Saxony. In the months after the Trump administration came into power, Nagel saw a dip in statistics supporting the AfD, showing that it had been harmed. “I was hoping for some time, but with the last elections, that hope diminished,” she said.
Joseph Vogl, a professor in the German department at Princeton University, discussed separating history into elements to understand where this divide all began. The planning for Trump’s America, which has influenced the AfD, began much earlier than you might think, he said. Trump’s far-right bid their time; Vogl calls it “long preparation”, and the inauguration of the Heritage Foundation in the 1970’s prepared them for the 2024 U.S. elections, giving them a 50-year head start.
The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the Trump administration’s success in 2024, when conspiracies, controversies, and the very nature of public life were called into question.
“The pandemic was an important moment; it was the emergence of social media, which suddenly created a completely new public sphere,” Vogl said. These elements, combined, Vogl thinks, have been important in the rise of the far-right across Europe and have contributed to the party divide in Germany.
To make sense of why the far-right is so successful, Nagel used an anecdote from a class she taught at Princeton during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nagel split the group into two and began a debate: one group argued for why vaccinations are necessary, and the other took on the role of conspiracy theorist anti-vaxxers. The group that argued against vaccines had infinitely more fun; they were able to make an abundance of irrational arguments.
“When we stopped, we were all so depressed, we hadn’t thought of this consciousness, of this joy of making counter-rational arguments,” she said, “I work on rhetoric, so I thought after that, Oh man, like this, we are doomed,” she continued.
Nagel wonders if the AfD learned their absurdity from Trump. “You know, [the AfD] is the party that called the Holocaust chicken shit, that is the party where Alice Weidel said that Hitler was a left-wing terrorist,” she said. Nagel thinks the AfD says things that are so absurd that they cannot be fact-checked. They maintain the intent to confuse and disorient, and it’s all for their own enjoyment, like the students in her class, who once derived great enjoyment from debating using irrational statements.
It must be noted that Die Linke, the leading Left party, won in Berlin’s September 2026 state elections, making this the first time a German-Turkish politician could become the mayor in Berlin. This shows that left-wing parties are “rejuvenating” themselves, but right-wing parties are too. “I’m afraid that the AfD will become the biggest party,” Nagel said.
The ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia has worsened the economic state in Germany. The energy restrictions on Russian gas, coupled with Trump’s tariffs, have caused a foreign crisis. Nagel explained that her friends at home in Germany are struggling financially, and she believes that companies raising prices by 300% “because of the war” are not justified. Rather, they are using the war as an excuse to capitalise.
“People feel really worried about humiliation, being unemployed. I would be, too,” she said.
Germany’s AfD gives a reason for its wish to stop providing foreign aid to Ukraine. According to a recent Reuters article, Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD leader in Saxony-Anhalt, presses CDU leader Merz to shift his focus to a campaign to end the war rather than to providing foreign aid to Ukraine. Siegmund wants the aid money to stay within Germany, “for the people in our country,” he said. However, it is not that simple.
“Putin is not going to stop the war. He just cannot stop it. He needs to continue the war for years and years because if he stops the war, the Russian economy is going to collapse faster than if he continues,” said Oksana Nesterenko, a Ukrainian public policy analyst and anti-corruption activist who works in Princeton’s SPIA (School of Public and International Affairs) department. According to this ideology, Siegmund is not truly interested in the end of the war because it is not possible. At the moment, he is more interested in retaining money in Germany.
Nagel thought about the state of politics in Germany, “all of this is depressing,” she said, believing that AfD will gain enough votes to take power in the future.
“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral,” a phrase in German she said, “It means first you need to eat, and then you can have morals.” Working-class people will not pursue altruistic politics; they’ll think of themselves first. If the AfD promises people a better life, people will vote for them, and the party will prevail.
