The Rise of Germany's AfD

Abstract

In 2017, a far-right party entered the German parliament for the first time in over half a century. The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) became the third largest party in the government. Its campaign focused on Euroscepticism and a nativist stance against immigration. The AfD used all available social media channels to spread this message. This paper seeks to understand the AfD's social media strategy over the last years on the full gamut of social media platforms and to verify the effectiveness of the party's online messaging strategy. For this purpose, we collected data related to Germany's main political parties from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. This data was subjected to a unified multi-platform analysis, which relies on four measures: party engagement, user engagement, message spread, and acceptance. This analysis proves the AfD's superior online popularity relative to the rest of Germany's political parties. The evidence also indicates that automated accounts contributed to this online superiority. Finally, we demonstrate that as part of its social media strategy, the AfD avoided discussion of its economic proposals and instead focused on pushing its anti-immigration agenda to gain popularity.