Pushing dyed blonde hair from her dark eyes, Nicole Kursch squints at her phone. Braced against the freezing Saxon cold, she taps the envelope logo on her screen to open the encrypted messaging app Telegram.
Nicole, 26, scrolls through the many direct conversations and semi-private group chats to get information about the upcoming German election.
Often she is scared by what she sees: videos of terrorist attacks, buildings exploding with fireworks and warnings about women’s safety. All, in her eyes, are bound together by one overriding threat: immigration.
“People are talking a lot about migration in the Telegram groups I’m a part of,” the young woman tells me. “They send around videos whenever there are attacks by migrants.”
Just days before we meet Nicole sipping coffee in Pirna, East Germany, a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker in a Mini Cooper injured 30 people by driving into a crowd in Munich.
The incident sparked memories of two horrifying summer attacks allegedly carried out by migrants, which saw four people die, including a policeman, and the murders of five women and a nine-year-old boy at a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg on December 20 in a horrifying attack that left 200 people injured when a Saudi man drove a car through the packed marketplace.
All of it has hardened Nicole’s resolve to vote for hard-right party Alternative für Deutschland on Sunday when she steps into the polling booth, a party whose hardline policies she knows from videos on her and social media feeds.
More and more young people are turning to the AfD (Image: Phil Harris)
Photo shows AFD posters outside a migrant camp in the east of Germany (Image: Phil Harris)
A highly controversial organisation with a regional leader who can legally be described as ‘fascist’ and groups on extremist watch lists, the AfD almost certainly won’t be in government because none of Germany’s mainstream parties will form a coalition with them.
It’s a block that hasn’t stopped them from surging to second in the pre-election polls, powered partly by its popularity with Generation Z voters like Kursch.
Yet even second place when the country goes to the polls on Sunday would send a shockwave through German politics and inform the actions of more mainstream parties. Whatever happens on Sunday, this is shaping up to be the most consequential ballot for a generation.
Since the last election, support among 18 to 29-year-olds has leapt from 6% to 17%.
In the past decade, the number of people voting for the AfD in Germany has tripled from 2 million in 2014 to over 6 million at last year’s European Parliamentary elections. The party, which only won its first Bundestag seat eight years ago, is projected to win close to a quarter of all the seats at the General Election, giving it unprecedented power to block and influence policy.
This is a remarkable change because, unlike neighbours Austria or France, Germany has not had a hard-right party take a serious share of the vote since the Second World War.
The horrific legacy of Adolf Hitler’s 12 years in power has for many years meant voters felt radical groups from this end of the political spectrum were dangerous.
When the AfD emerged in the 2010s, there was little expectation that they would break that trend. Mainstream politicians and media followed the strategy that had worked so effectively with similar parties in the past: ignore and exclude.
Blocked from traditional channels, the AfD invested in social media sinking a third of their budget into marketing online. It’s a move that has paid dividends as more and more political conversations move online.
According to Clara Bunger, a politician for left wing party Der Linke, rivals who mocked this strategy have been left red-faced.
“Everyone was laughing at them back in 2017 but I think it has paid off,” she tells me.
Bunger’s own party, which is also outside the traditional mainstream, has found harnessing the power of social media drives vote share.
Since Der Linke started publishing meme-based social media content and got its politicians rapping policies over techno soundtracks, it has leapt from 4% to 9% in the polls.
“We were not like a huge party so we had to improvise and to see what would work,” says Bunger, who is referred to as a ‘slayqueen’ on the one party’s official accounts.
“The social media strategy we have is to put in a lot of information and education, but also be entertaining.”
Preparing for this ‘digital doorstepping’ is unlike any other type of political campaigning. Bunger finds spending time scrolling through social media feeds helps craft a message that can reach a larger audience.
The challenge for Bunger is that while her arguments tend to focus on policy and statistics the AfD will often work on triggering emotional responses, especially when terror attacks or other shocking news events take place.
“You have to calculate your own strategy [when] they are working with this emotion [and think] so how do you counter it?” she adds.
“What we try to do is get back to the [rational part of the brain] and try to be empathetic.
“We cannot deny the emotions of the people, but we can try to make them understand that the emotions the [AfD] are playing with are not helped with their policy ideas.”
In a country where voters have historically chosen politicians with steady hands ahead of those who ooze charisma, the idea that leaders need to be emotional or entertaining is a remarkable shift. But these are the parameters in which the election is being fought.
Even sitting Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is perceived as dull, has been recording videos with influencers blind-ranking his favourite types of potatoes.
But it may also be the very fact the mainstream German media has ignored and derided the AfD that has added to its allure.
According to AfD supporter Vadim Derksen, the success of the party on social media has less to do with outstanding strategy and more about a sense of taboo.
“Before this election, the established media for example didn’t really talk to the party members or representatives [but] they would talk about them,” he says.
“This created a kind of curiosity among the [voters]. They wanted to find out what’s actually the matter with the AfD. So they end up searching for them and get a direct view of the party [rather than having it filtered through the media].”
Vadim, who was formerly employed by the AfD, is one of the beneficiaries of this in his role working for alternative media platform Junge Freiheit.
They have seen traffic to their website and social channels surge in the wake of news events, such as terror attacks, with people seeking out AfD-related content.
Vadim believes the mainstream stigma has also been a factor in driving young people to the Far Right.
“The youth like to rebel so when older people and teachers tell them not to vote for the AfD that creates even more curiosity why they shouldn’t,” he says.
“So they go to and see the AfD talking like normal people, maybe sharing views they have and that’s why they’ve got so popular [with them].”
Unlike Britain or America, Germany has a long history of setting quite strict boundaries for what can and can’t be said in public.
For example, it can be a criminal offence to speak to a police officer and refer to them using the wrong version of the word ‘you’.
But such restrictions are harder to manage on messaging apps or social media platforms headquartered in other countries, especially if, as is the case with Telegram’s Pavel Durov and X’s , their owners are taking hardline stances on ‘free speech absolutism’.
Under ‘s presidency, Germany also faces external political pressure to conform to an American view.
During a visit to Munich last week, Vice President JD Vance suggested that the US would remove its military protection from the country unless it changes its approach to “digital censorship” and the long-held “firewall” to working with parties like the AfD.
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Dr Heiko Giebler believes the party has become normalised (Image: Phil Harris)
In response, Chancellor Olaf Scholz used the phrase “never again” – commonly associated in Germany with discussions about the Holocaust – to reiterate the mainstream parties’ commitment to not working with the AfD.
But the truth is that his coalition government partner already broke the convention a few weeks earlier when a bill on tougher border and asylum rules passed thanks to a deal between the hard-right party and the Christian Democratic Union.
Dr Heiko Giebler, senior political scientist at Freie Universität Berlin, believes this co-operation has helped “normalise” the party.
“It kind of helps them that all other parties seem to talk mainly about their core topics and issues, like migration and security. What this means is that citizens and voters consider those issues to be important,” he says.
He believes there has been an oversimplification about young people breaking to the right. The trend he says has less to do with social media and more the fact that almost none of the other parties are pushing policies that benefit the young.
“I don’t think that parties really talk a lot about the youth or how to fix the things that might benefit them,” he explains.
“They’re not going to spend on education or on issues that are related to climate change. So I think it really is quite difficult for the younger generation to feel represented by many of the parties.”
Regardless of how the AfD performs at this election, it’s no exaggeration to say that everything we thought we knew about German politics has changed. And that there will be consequences for the rest of Europe including the UK.
From the need to entertain to the way mainstream parties engage with the hard right, how those with the power now choose to respond to these new challenges in Europe’s powerhouse economy is likely to define the continent for generations to come.