Alternative for Germany (German: Alternative für Deutschland, AfD; German pronunciation: [aːʔɛfˈdeː] (listen)) is a right-wing populist political party in Germany. AfD is known for its opposition to the European Union, as well as immigration to Germany. The AfD's ideology is positioned on the radical right, a subset of the far-right, within the family of European political parties. Established in April 2013, AfD narrowly missed the 5% electoral threshold to sit in the Bundestag during the 2013 German federal election. The party won seven seats in the 2014 European Parliament election in Germany as a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). After securing representation in 14 of the 16 German state parliaments by October 2017, AfD won 94 seats in the 2017 German federal election and became the third largest party in the country as well as the largest opposition party; its lead candidates were co-vice chairman Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel, the latter having served as the party group leader in the 19th Bundestag. In the 2021 German federal election, AfD dropped to the fifth largest party. AfD was founded by Gauland, Bernd Lucke, and former members of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) to oppose the policies of the Eurozone as a right-wing and moderately Eurosceptic alternative to the centre-right but pro-European CDU. The party presented itself as an economic liberal, soft Eurosceptic, and conservative movement in its early years. AfD has subsequently moved further to the right, and expanded its policies under successive leaderships to include opposition to immigration, Islam, and the European Union. After 2015, AfD has often been characterized as an anti-Islam, anti-immigration, German nationalist, national-conservative, and a Eurosceptic party. The AfD is the only party represented in the German Bundestag whose environmental and climate policy is based on the denial of human-caused climate change. Several state associations and other Factions of AfD have been linked to or accused of harboring connections with far-right nationalist and proscribed movements, such as PEGIDA, the Neue Rechte and Identitarian movements, and of employing historical revisionist and xenophobic rhetoric. They have been observed by various state offices for the protection of the constitution since 2018. AfD's leadership has denied that the party is racist and has been internally divided on whether to endorse such groups. In January 2022 however, party leader Jörg Meuthen resigned his party chairmanship with immediate effect and left the AfD, as according to him the party had developed very far to the right with totalitarian traits and in large parts was no longer based on the free-democratic basic order. In March 2021, most of Germany's major media outlets reported that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) had placed AfD under surveillance as a suspected extremist group. Shortly after this announcement, surveillance of AfD was blocked by the courts to give equal opportunities among political parties in a key election year. In 2022, it was ruled that the BfV may classify and monitor the entire party as a suspected right-wing extremist. A corresponding lawsuit by the AfD was dismissed, because "there were sufficient factual indications of anti-constitutional efforts within the AfD". From Wikipedia
