When you go back to 2013, Bernd Lucke carried the whole initial wave of AfD on the back of dumping the Euro. He actually got 810,000 votes (1.9-percent). Most people believe that he basically took the majority of the 810,000 votes from the FDP Party (they did lousy in this election....barely getting one million votes.
If you asked most Germans about the anti-Euro feeling in 2013...this was NOT a top ten problem on their list. It probably didn’t even make the top fifty-list.
Oddly, the crowd that drifted in and attached to the AfD...were the same type crowd that hyped up the immigration issue at the end of 2014, and eventually dumped Bernd Lucke in July of 2015 (he didn’t want the party to become the anti-immigrant party).
Today? Bernd Lucke runs another party...Liberal Conservative Reformers. Same gameplan....anti-Euro.
If you went over to the AfD today and brought up the Euro or anti-Euro chat...the majority has no real opinion. So you just kinda grin over this. A political party built upon one single issue in 2013...firing their originator...then going to another single issue in 2017 of a totally different category.
Why bother making the party then? That is really strange.
Thank you
If I might add a couple things to what you said: The founders of AfD did fine to get their party’s foot in the door. That was two generations of leadership ago. The movement has been growing like topsy; and, developing a life of its own. I love the egg-head Euro position of the original AfD. But that position is not what propelled AfD into double-digits. Here’s the issue:
AfD is affirming that there’s something good about Germany (and northern Europe in general), whereas the other parties come across as apologetic.
In Germany, it is expected that everyone incorporates work, family life, and outdoor activities into a well-balanced and wholesome life. People are committed to honesty and treating each other with courtesy. It is a country that balances its national budget, where the unemployment rate is low, and where social insurance works.
Now, there is an invasion of people who do not embrace these values, who don’t speak the language, who don’t work regularly, who are involved in drug trafficking and human trafficking and in sexual assault against females and boys. And the major parties are too ashamed of their country’s history to defend the country against this assault, and too beholden to the big corporations that rely on cheap immigrant labor.
This is what AfD taps into, and the elites call it extremism.