BERLIN — No party has more experience on TikTok than the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Its 602 videos provide insight into how the party is leveraging the platform for its election campaign.
Ahead of the national elections on Sunday, following the collapse late last year of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government, a researcher from the University of St. Gallen collected the videos using AI-driven accounts, which Die Zeit then proceeded to analyze.
Taken together, the material offers a snapshot of the AfD’s TikTok ecosystem.
Top influence: Alice Weidel
One thing stands out: No one shines more on the AfD’s TikTok than Alice Weidel. About every other video features the lead candidate — whether in parliament, in a studio or in private settings.
Dedicated Weidel fan accounts echo her appearances, sometimes humorously, sometimes more assertively. Weidel’s official TikTok account is also particularly prominent — and successful, having garnered some 4.4 million views and half a million likes for its Weidels Konter campaign video. The topic? “How ‘mass immigration‘ has made Christmas markets unsafe.”
AfD-affiliated accounts spread party content, produce their own contributions, and thereby increase visibility, sometimes with off-the-political-beat clips, like people singing “happy birthday” to Weidel.
The AfD’s TikTok strategy focuses on quantity.
One topic dominates the AfD’s digital ecosystem more than any other: migration. One in four videos addresses immigration, and the tone is almost consistently negative, often linked to crime and insecurity. In one video, Anna Nguyen, an AfD representative in the Hessian state parliament, debates with a passerby. She claims that there were no gang rapes “before 2015.” This is false: Germany’s 2014 crime statistics record 423 such cases. And the majority of perpetrators were German.
The buzzword “gender,” on the other hand, is barely present — appearing in only about 1% of the videos. This is despite the fact that opposition to so-called “gender ideology” is a core part of the AfD’s political platform.
The AfD’s TikTok strategy focuses on quantity, which is not unusual, and many videos are fairly basic, production-wise. A minority of those go viral, with about one in 20 getting over the 1-million-view mark.
Deliberate TikTok presence
The AfD’s TikTok success is no coincidence. Party strategists have long deliberately targeted the platform. The method: flooding it with videos that repeat straightforward, populist messages — until one goes viral. The goal is to occupy what they call the “metapolitical space” by first triggering a rightward shift in people’s minds, then in parliaments.
Past studies by German media stern, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Correctiv revealed that party supporters, particularly from the now-dissolved Young Alternative, coordinated in chat groups. They shared video material and instructions for creating and distributing TikToks in a synchronized manner.
The AfD has become pop culture. Young people boast in videos about not being “left-green-infested ticks” but rather voting blue, the far-right party’s color. On TikTok, AfD member of European Parliament Maximilian Krah is celebrated like a pop star, with fan accounts compiling scenes of him and setting them to dramatic music.
Blaming the others
A recurring narrative on AfD-TikTok is that of decline: Germany is on the brink, and the established parties are to blame. “This is a common tactic among right-wing populists,” says Julia Ebner, a researcher at the University of Oxford specializing in extremism and online radicalization. “Emotions like anger and fear translate into engagement on TikTok,” she explains. The algorithm favors content that generates strong reactions and prolonged watch time — a built-in advantage for right-wing populist actors.
“In the migration debate, the AfD deliberately stokes fears about the safety of women and children. This is highly emotionalizing,” Ebner says. This tactic is particularly effective following actual violent incidents, like Dec. 20 attack in Magdeburg, when an SUV drove into a crowd at a Christmas market, killing five and leaving at least 299 injured.
Among the analyzed videos, multiple clips feature the same emotional speech by Alice Weidel. In it, she demands political change so that “we never again have to mourn with a mother who has lost her son in such a senseless and brutal way.”
This narrative serves a dual function: It fosters a sense of threat while strengthening in-group cohesion. At the same time, it demonizes those outside the group — both core elements of extremist psychological messaging, according to Ebner.
#wir #mädels #fürdich #deutschland
#wir #mädels #fürdich #deutschland
Ugly throwbacks
Parallel to this, there are videos aimed at engaging Germans with migration backgrounds, part of a broader outreach strategy. These include vox pops, where people with immigrant backgrounds express support for the AfD, as well as videos from users who say that the AfD does not seek to expel all “foreigners.”
Even the extreme fringe (which we deliberately choose not to not link to here) appears in the analyzed videos. A rapper from the far-right hip-hop crew NDS, for example, first sends congratulations on “154 years of the German Reich” from an ice bath.
And then there’s Clarissa, presumably a student. On TikTok, she shows off her moped with an overlaid text in lowercase: “wake up already, whoever doesn’t vote blue votes for war.”
The short video is set to dark synth sounds, accompanied by an old audio recording. A rough voice speaks of a “small, rootless clique” that fuels hatred among nations. These are the words of Adolf Hitler, spoken in 1933 before a Siemens workforce.
