By Alex Norbrook
As Martin Kohler strolled down Sonnenallee, the main drag of the Berlin borough of Neukölln, he could not contain his dismay to the camera. Along the street, kebab shops sizzled, sending the aroma of roasting meat drifting through the cold winter air. Shoppers in heavy coats browsed clothing outlets that advertised headscarves and perused grocery stores that boasted halal meat. Kohler’s reaction was blunt: “No integration,” he said in English.
Kohler spoke about how immigrant-populated neighborhoods like the one in Neukölln were cropping up across the city, altering its character for the worse. His companion on the street, an up-and-coming conservative YouTuber from England, asked him in a concerned tone whether the average German wanted this expansion in a city like Berlin. Without missing a beat, Kohler replied, “No. Absolutely not.”
At least, that is what Kohler hoped to convey to the 270,000 viewers of the video his colleague produced. The reality in Berlin, though, is a little more complicated.
Kohler, a tall man with bright blue eyes and close-cropped brown hair, is a rising voice in Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which is notorious in Germany for its hardline policies on immigration and ties to extremist organizations. Despite these associations, or perhaps because of them, AfD has surged in popularity. It now boasts of being the most popular party in the country.
But Berlin, which counts as a state in Germany’s federal system, is different. The city is celebrated as the most progressive, multicultural, and migrant-friendly place in Germany—the kind of place where “Because we love you” is the motto of the subway system. The kind of place where, when Kohler approached a group of young people on the street in Neukölln, they flipped off the camera and cheered: “fuck AfD!” When the right surged during February’s federal elections nationwide, Berlin bucked the trend—it moved left.
When I spoke with Kohler in mid-October, he told me that this challenging environment only makes him more determined. “As a patriot,” Kohler said, “if you give up the capital city, you can give up the whole project of getting in power and conquering your country back.” With an election in Berlin coming later next year, his party is preparing to take on that project. What would it take for them to succeed?
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The AfD has been on the rise since 2013, when the party burst onto Germany’s political scene with a populist conservative program. Its founders lashed out against Angela Merkel’s government for bailing out southern European countries during the Eurozone crisis. Then, when Merkel opened Germany’s borders to Syrians fleeing civil war in 2015, uttering her famous phrase “Wir schaffen das” (“we can do this”), AfD rebutted, suggesting Germany couldn’t—and shouldn’t. Soon, it unveiled its vehement opposition to migrants, especially to those coming from Arab countries.
Since its founding, AfD has evolved with the times, fanning flames of animosity against whatever coalition was in power. When Covid hit Germany, party leaders adopted an anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine position, allying themselves with the far-right group PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West). When energy prices began to soar after the Russia-Ukraine war, AfD directed its ire toward renewable energy, blaming climate policies that incentivized wind and solar energy installations. Party members even began to attack proposals to put speed limits on the Autobahn to save on gas. “They are really strategically clever crisis entrepreneurs,” said Manès Wiesskircher, a political scientist at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), “rejecting all government policies in order to benefit from the dismay among significant parts of the population.”
With these strategies, the party has surged in popularity to become one of the largest and most energetic political movements in the country. It shocked the country with its performance in the 2025 federal elections, winning over 20 percent of the vote share. “There’s only three parties in all of the history of the Federal Republic of Germany who made it above 20% in a federal election,” said Robert Eschricht, an AfD state representative for Neukölln. “We really are up and coming.” The AfD now tops opinion polls as the most favored party nationwide.
But what is true for the country has not yet become a reality in Berlin. At the state level, a center-right coalition is firmly in power, a large left-wing bloc wields influence, and people are skeptical of the AfD’s restrictive approach to migration. [need a bit more context here]
“They think we are the devil,” said state party chair Kristin Brinker. As the 2026 federal elections approach, AfD’s mission in Berlin is to convince the public otherwise.
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On a warm June evening in 2023, Peter Kurth hosted a party at his apartment and rooftop terrace in Berlin. A former state politician for the center-right CDU party, Kurth has deep ties with the Identitarian Movement, a pan-European neo-fascist organization that claims it seeks to protect white identity from multiculturalism and migration into Europe. Invited to the event were the who’s who of Europe’s radical right, including AfD’s top candidate for the European Parliament elections in 2024, a “right-wing extremist” publisher known for publishing a book called “Regime Change from the Right,” and an Austrian Identitarian politician. The attendance of one partygoer was more of a surprise. That person was Kristin Brinker.
Few people know when Brinker left the party. Brinker claims she made a quick exit, “shocked” by the evening’s discussions, which included tk. Others say she stayed for quite some time and enjoyed herself, with one AfD politician recalling that he spoke with her until “a very advanced hour that evening,” according to a local publication.
Either way, the optics of the face of the AfD in Berlin appearing at a private right-wing extremist event were less than ideal. When the story broke that Brinker attended the party, Berlin’s otherwise-doughy political scene erupted. The scandal threatened to undermine the self-presentation Brinker had worked hard to establish for herself, and her party in Berlin.
Brinker, an architect by trade, joined the AfD in 2013. Sporting bright blond hair and speaking with a warm, cheerful tone, Brinker possesses a calming demeanor that could not be farther from the stereotypical image of a far-right politician. Brinker is highly aware of this image, referring to herself as “not the typical AfD politician.”
“She’s not a very radical person,” said Robert Kiesel, a columnist on Berlin politics at Taggesspiegel. “ She is a professional politician.”
Brinker, who describes herself as “more liberal than my colleagues,” became chair of AfD Berlin in 2021, after a fierce internal leadership competition between her and Beatrix von Storch, a duchess and the maternal granddaughter of Adolf Hitler’s finance minister. Von Storch is known to be more radical than many in the party on the national stage. But in Berlin, she lost to Brinker by two votes.
Since then, Brinker has pursued several strategies to try to moderate AfD’s image in Berlin.
Part of that effort involves in-person interactions. During election seasons, she can be found on the street under a light-blue AfD umbrella, handing out leaflets to passersby with a smile. This effort, Brinker hopes, makes the AfD seem more approachable. “A lot of people say, ‘oh, I saw something on TV, and then I make my opinion about the AfD,’” she said. But if she can speak with people face-to-face, she elicits a more favorable reaction. “Many people say to me, ‘wow, you are the AfD? It’s okay what you say. I can understand it,’” she said.
Brinker told me that she has also forged closer relationships with the media. For the past two years, she has held a parliamentary conference in Copenhagen and invited journalists to come. “It shows the journalists that we are thinking in a normal way, [that] we are normal people,” she said. “They can call me, I can call them.”
In doing so, she has diverged from her party’s longstanding mistrust of mainstream media. The AfD has traditionally __[context tk]_. “As a journalist working for serious media, it’s very hard to find people who are willing to talk with me,” Kaisel said. “Because for them, serious media is like an enemy.”
Under Brinker’s leadership, the state party has stuck to a coordinated messaging strategy to emphasize its moderation, according to Agnes Sundermeyer, a journalist at RBB who covers Berlin state politics. Extreme statements from national leaders are not reflected at the state level. Where AfD co-chair Alice Widel calls for “remigration,” the forcible return of migrants, including German citizens, to their country of origin, AfD Berlin’s parliamentary group has avoided the term. “Under the leadership of Kristin Brinker, it avoided appearing with radical or neo-right-wing positions,” Sundermeyer said. “Anyone within the parliamentary group or the state branch who does so is not allowed to put themselves in the spotlight.”
To some commentators, though, Brinker’s personal image has more sinister effects, distracting from the more radical figures in the state party. “You have this Brinker in the front for the serious masquerade, but in her back you have really tough guys,” Kiesel said. Other Berlin Parliament members have traveled to Russian conferences or tk tk tk. But according to Kiesel, Brinker’s tone draws attention away from her colleagues.
If anything, Sundermeyer suggests that Brinker has tolerated these right-wing elements in her state party, rather than cracking down on them. “She pursued a strategy of integration and inclusion,” Sundermeyer said. But it is unclear whether Brinker could marginalize AfD Berlin’s right flank even if she wanted to.
The question of how long Brinker stayed at Kurth’s party remains unresolved. So does the question of her motivations. Brinker may not publicly voice an opinion on more contentious topics like remigration. But her silence does send a message of what she is willing to tolerate in her own party. “She’s not saying, ‘this is not what I stand for,’” Kiesel said.
***
Standing in a plaza in the eastern district of Lichtenburg, Gottfried Curio, an AfD member of the Bundestag, riled up a crowd of supporters waving German flags and cheering. Do you know how many Syrians there are in Germany? he asked his 200-person audience. One million! Even if 0.1 percent are criminals, that’s a thousand people. A thousand assassins. Do we want them in our country?
The immediate target of Curio’s ire was a block of hotels in the neighborhood, which the Berlin state government was planning to rent out to shelter 1,200 migrants. The move was part of Berlin’s strategy for addressing the surge in migrant population it has faced since 2015. Within a year of the original migrant surge, Berlin was reported to receive more than 10,000 refugees in one month; since 2016, the country as a whole has received an average of 210,000 new asylum applications per year, excluding Ukrainians. This influx put strain on Berlin’s already tight housing system, prompting the government to act.
Among a slate of policy measures, Berlin began to rapidly build new shelters and convert existing buildings to accommodate migrants. The state government even transformed a former airport into refugee housing, in addition to office buildings, houses, hostels, and hotels, like the one in Lichtenburg. When new conversions are announced, Kiesel noted, “the AfD will go there and try to make some noise.”
According to Kiesel, these policies have been rushed, and are inadequate to the scale of the housing crunch at hand. Mainstream parties fumbling the ball on migrant shelter has opened up room for attacks on the right. “We have people in Berlin who came as refugees years ago and they are still living in camps because German politics was not able to make solutions,” Kiesel said. “It’s a very easy play for the AfD.”
Berlin’s AfD has used these shelters as political ammunition for its anti-migration mission. Representatives frequently make shelter conversions the target of their ire, and point to the level of government spending required to support refugees—through housing, and also government-funded stipends for migrants seeking work. Of Berlin’s $40 billion annual budget, Brinker noted, more than $3 billion is spent on migration-related expenses: “only so that people can live in a flat, in a hotel, in a tent, whatever.”
Concerns about the cost of support for migrants soon blurs into racialized fears about how well migrants “integrate” into German society. On Kohler’s tour through Berlin with his English influencer, he stopped by another building that was soon to be converted into new accommodations: 950 for asylum seekers, and 550 for students. “I asked the mayor of this district, ‘would you put your daughter, when she goes to university, into a house with 950 Afghans, Syrians, and so on?’”
[one graf about integration fearmongering]
By focusing on these migrant shelters, local AfD members seek to capitalize on a generalized anxiety around immigration. But in cities like Berlin, the effectiveness of this strategy has been mixed, according to Katja Salomo, a research associate on far-right extremism at the Social Science Centre Berlin (WZB) who studies anti-immigrant messaging and voting behavior in German cities. Oftentimes, the people most persuaded by anti-immigrant rhetoric are those who do not live in areas with low immigrant populations, such as wealthier districts, and who encounter immigration mostly through media platforms. “You just have this fearful media discourse and no immediate personal experience” with immigrants, Salomo said. “When it comes to immigration, people fear the unknown.”
Meanwhile, when urban residents live among immigrant communities, they are more likely to interact with them: interactions which studies show reduce stereotyping and fear. “As soon as they live with [immigrants] in their neighborhood, these foreigners become neighbors,” she said. In these cases, support for AfD tends to weaken.
In Berlin’s poorer districts, though, Salomo found that the decline in AfD support is less pronounced, as lower-income individuals in these areas are drawn to the AfD because of its economic populist messaging: a trend that is ubiquitous across Germany, according to tk. “They are very, very dissatisfied with the economic outlook and the economic situation and are therefore more susceptible” to the AfD, Salomo said.
AfD support in Berlin is currently highest in the economically disadvantaged boroughs in former East Berlin. Gläser told me that this was because they could discern elements of East Germany’s authoritarian ambitions in the policies of the city’s left-wing parties. But if people support the AfD for economic concerns, rather than migration-related fears, then the party’s migration messaging may be less useful than it believes. And the party may be more vulnerable as a result, Salomo said.
But the political power AfD generates by critiquing migration policy has already left a mark on Berlin. Nearby the Lichtenburg apartments, a derelict building was slated to be converted into another refugee shelter. After AfD pressure, the local council pivoted to building a school there, instead.
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Sections TK:
- Youth
- Young AfD – Kohler.
- 2 other young AfD people
- End with chaotic launch
- Covid movie scene – focus on inflammatory rhetoric and being a minority party critiquing everything.
- Gläser
- Eschricht
- The guy I spoke with at the event
- JWM
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Berlin will hold state-level elections again in 2026. The AfD members I spoke with were optimistic about their chances. If federal elections were held tomorrow, the AfD would gain 26% of the vote and tie with the CDU, Chancellor Merz’s party, according to DW. In Berlin, the party is projected to surge from 9% to 15% of the electorate, pulling ahead of the Greens.
[TK here]
“All we ask for is a fair trial,” said Eschricht.
