As far as the youth vote is concerned, it's true that AfD seem - weirdly - to be regarded as the most skilled party in Germany at reaching young people via smart social media messaging. However, as I understand it, the exit polling shows that the far-left Die Linke, the successor party to East Germany's ruling communists, actually won a narrow plurality among 18-24 year olds, which represents an astonishing comeback for a party that seemed to be dying until very recently. Even a few days ago, the polls were still suggesting that they might fall short of the 5% threshold and fail to win any parliamentary represenation at all, but the youth vote and the anti-fascist vote has swung heavily behind them in the closing stages.
Nobody can say that AfD have failed - they've doubled their vote and reached second place for the first time in a federal election. But the bottom line is that they have not won the election, and because all of the other parties have categorically refused to work with them, they have zero prospect of being part of the government for the foreseeable future. I formed the impression from watching part of the post-election leaders' debate (one of Germany's most bizarre political traditions) that the AfD leader thought her best bet was for the parliamentary arithmetic to force the Christian Democrats to form a three-way, ideologically mixed coalition with the Social Democrats and the Greens, which might prove to be just as unstable as the previous three-way, ideologically-mixed Social Democrat-Green-Free Democrat coalition, and could thus fall apart and bring about an opening for AfD at an early election. However, if the live results I'm looking at right now are accurate, it appears that the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats will have a clear majority between them. Previous 'grand coalitions' between those two parties have actually proved quite stable.
So all that's happened is that the AfD have become the largest opposition party, and that will only really matter if they can use it as a springboard to get into first place at the next scheduled election four years from now. There's nothing inevitable about that - after all, people have been predicting for years that the far-right will get into power in France and it still hasn't happened. But admittedly it can't be totally ruled out, and even a 10% chance of an AfD-led government is potentially game-changing in terms of perceptions of where Europe is headed. AfD have been Eurosceptic since their earliest days as a much more moderate centre-right party, but they now seem to have firmed that up into a policy of full withdrawal from the EU. The EU came through Brexit remarkably unscathed, but without one-half of the traditional Franco-German engine which has driven the bloc forward since the 1950s, it could be a very different story.
The AfD stance on NATO appears more ambivalent, but at the very least they seem to want American nuclear weapons removed from German soil, which would be a monumental break with the past (and indeed the present). I won't be a hypocrite about this - it's a welcome policy, although it's safe to assume that coming from a far-right party it's probably a case of 'correct policy, wrong reasons'.
And what about the most basic question of all - are the AfD anti-democracy, as their far-right predecessors the Nazis were? I can't see any evidence that the AfD leadership are interested in dismantling the democratic system, but when I was growing up I remember it always being said that the only way to truly embed democracy into a society with such a strong authoritarian tradition as Germany's is to embed Germany itself into a united, democratic Europe. If Germany was outside the European system, and particularly if the European system itself fell apart as a result of Germany's withdrawal, there would always be that little question mark.
But here's the thing - Germany has proportional representation. When Farage says that he'll take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights within 100 days of taking power, that has to be taken very seriously, because under first-past-the-post Reform could win an absolute majority in parliament with less than 30% of the vote. By contrast, to have any chance of withdrawing Germany from the EU, there would have to a doubling of the current AfD vote from 20% to 40%, and even then they would probably need an anti-European coalition partner. It looks like the only possible candidate is the new "Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht" party, which is one of those peculiar 'economically left, socially right' parties that are becoming ever more common, although unlike most of those parties, they are in the final analysis regarded as far-left rather than far-right. But at the moment they look like falling short of the threshold for parliamentary representation by a margin of just 0.1%, which could be a decisive setback that will prevent them even being a credible force by 2029.
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