How the AfD Plans to Win Berlin
“At the moment, almost every German is saying that Berlin is a shithole: There are too many crimes, there is too much trash on the street, drug addicts at the train stations, and so on,” Martin Kohler told me as he sipped a cappuccino in the basement café of Berlin’s state assembly building. Kohler, a tall, white man with round glasses and a cheerful demeanor that contrasts with his alarmist words, is an up-and-comer in Germany’s far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Currently the chair of a local AfD faction in Berlin, Kohler also used to head the state’s Young AfD group before it was labeled a right-wing extremist group by the German government and subsequently dissolved.
To Kohler, Berlin is the clearest example of what happens when the left is allowed to govern: it is a city dominated by the left wing, full of immigrants, and restrictive of the free market. But where far-right politicians in other countries may consider their capital cities a lost cause electorally and symbolically, Kohler takes a different view. “As a patriot,” he said. “If you give up the capital city, you can give up the whole project of getting in power and conquering your country back.”
The AfD has been gathering momentum across Germany. During the 2025 federal elections, it won second place nationwide, receiving 20.8% of the vote. The party is gaining in the east, with polls finding that if an election were held today in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, AfD would earn a record 40% of the vote.
But the party has struggled to bring its success to the nation’s capital, where a center-right SPD/CDU coalition is in power, a large left-wing bloc wields influence, and people are skeptical of the AfD’s restrictive approach to migration. Because of these factors, the party is a marginal force in Berlin’s state politics. It only holds 10 percent of seats in the Berlin House of Representatives. The regional government has set up a “firewall” to block it from performing basic functions, from serving in committees to relegating its federal offices to the farthest office building from the Bundestag. It has been plagued by a history of infighting and incompetence that one former member characterized as “unambitious mediocrity and opportunistic indifference.”
If AfD plans to earn the right to call itself a national movement, it needs to make ground in Berlin. For my final project, I intend to write about how they plan to adapt to Berlin’s local particularities as they prepare for the 2026 Berlin State elections. Will people like Kohler try to court voters on the left that are concerned with the AfD’s hardline policies and connections with extremist groups, or will they stick to a more sympathetic right-wing base? How will they adapt their anti-immigration agenda to a voter base in which nearly 40% of citizens have a migrant background? Answering these questions will shed light on AfD’s capacity to “detoxify” its image, as well as its chances of successfully carrying out its anti-migrant policies.
To write this story, I hope to build on the interviews I conducted with AfD state politicians and party representatives, especially those who represent or come from districts with large communities of people with migrant backgrounds. I plan to talk with political scientists who are analyzing AfD’s strategies and ask them about their thoughts on the chances of AfD gaining ground in Berlin. I also seek to learn from social media influencers who have boosted AfD’s popularity among youth voters. Finally, I hope to contact representatives from other parties in Berlin to learn about how they are responding to AfD’s success (or lack thereof) in the district.
