According to a study, the AfD is more popular than ever among young people. On the social media app TikTok, no party has more likes. But there is headwind.
Marvin is a student, 18 years old, and likes to watch AfD videos on TikTok. “This is not boring politician chatter,” he says. On the cell phone screen in his hand, Maximilian Krah, the AfD’s leading candidate in the European elections, is currently criticizing the EU’s border protection.
Krah has over half a million likes on TikTok. The platform has severely limited his reach due to “repeated violations of our community guidelines.” Student Marvin sees the clips anyway. He specifically targets the profile of the AfD politician. “Krah is also a tough guy in the way he conveys it,” says Marvin. This convinced him so much that he was about to join the AfD youth organization Junge Alternative (JA).
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has classified the JA as a “secure extremist effort”. The Cologne Administrative Court rejected an urgent application by the party in February. The AfD’s regional associations are considered to be “certainly right-wing extremist” in Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, and a suspected case in Bavaria.
AfD is becoming increasingly popular among young people
Marvin isn’t the only one who gets caught up in the AfD politicians’ TikTok videos. If there were a federal election now, 22 percent of 14 to 29 year olds in Germany would vote for the AfD. This was the result of the “Youth in Germany 2024” survey. Two years ago it was nine percent. Experts suspect a connection with the party’s great success on TikTok. There the AfD reaches more than three times as many users as all other parties in the Bundestag combined. An analysis has shown that which ZDFheute reported on.
Media expert Klaus Lutz is also worried about the developments. He is managing director of the Parabol media center in Nuremberg and media consultant for the Middle Franconia district. Lutz can explain why the AfD’s content works particularly well on TikTok.
Algorithm responds to populism
The AfD uses a suitable scheme for the app, Lutz describes: “Hate messages are emotional, simply tailored, not differentiated.” Users like and comment on such videos a lot – including critically. The algorithm rewards this and pushes the videos into more and more channels. “And the phenomenon is stronger on TikTok than on other platforms. You slip into the maelstrom more quickly,” says Lutz.
Other parties are not prepared to “jump on the AfD’s woodcut-like, hate- and inflammatory speech” and therefore have less reach. In addition, the AfD has understood that it does not only increase its reach through positive videos, says the media expert.
Marvin’s classmate Maya believes: “Many young people don’t take politics as seriously as they should be taken seriously. The AfD produces more funny content than other parties, so people get to it more quickly.”
Right-wing influencers set the tone
AfD also uses influencers to flush their messages into the feeds. “The videos are about topics such as masculinity,” says Lutz. Topics that actually seem harmless, but which the influencers deliberately load up with right-wing populist wording. The result: The users get used to the tenor.
Last but not least, the AfD began very early on to create its own channels in order to distribute its content unfiltered, says Lutz. So the party has a time advantage. “And this means they understand the mechanisms better.” For example, the AfD structures Bundestag speeches in such a way that short excerpts from them can easily be uploaded to TikTok, says Lutz.
#ReclaimTikTok wants to promote democratic discourse
In the past few weeks, others have also followed suit: the Bundestag parties want to bring more democratic discourse to the platform using the hashtag #ReclaimTikTok. Since then, more and more politicians have created accounts.
Omid Nouripour, federal leader of the Green Party, explains in one of his first clips: “We hesitated for a long time to be present on TikTok. Why? Because TikTok is not clean when it comes to data protection.” But now they want to counter the “hatred and agitation” and “turn things around”.
Nasser Ahmed is an SPD city councilor in Nuremberg and deputy general secretary of the Bavarian SPD. He has been active on TikTok for over three years – according to his own statement, he is one of the first German politicians. TikTok presence is important to him because: “For democracy we have to be in all rooms where communication takes place.”
Since the beginning of the year, more and more party colleagues have joined. “For a few weeks now, the party leaders have been drawing attention to how important it is to follow suit on TikTok, both verbally and repeatedly in circular emails,” says Ahmed. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has also had his own TikTok account since April.
Now it’s about striking the right tone. Ahmed thinks: “We can also take things a step further.” For example, he posts content like: “Germany has no problem with migration, Germany would have a problem without migration.” What is most important, however, is “that the content is shortened but still true.”
And the opposition also wants to counter the AfD on TikTok. Just like Bundestag member Ronja Kemmer (CDU). She has had an account since 2022 and thinks it is important “that we don’t leave the field to the AfD on TikTok either.” In order to achieve this, she doesn’t want to bend over backwards for the algorithms, but she still wants to “make her content as ‘snackable’ as possible.”
What can parents and educators do?
Michael Becker is Maya and Marvin’s history teacher. There are a lot of debates between the young people in his class, he says. “It’s important to me that you have a culture of conversation and can talk about everything,” he says. But he “counters it with expertise” and “refutes when there is something to refute.”
Media educator Lutz also believes it is important not to force an opinion on young people, but rather to make young people who engage in populist content think.