Alice Weidel, head of the German right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD), was euphoric as she stood on stage on Sunday night together with Robert Lambrou, her party’s lead candidate in the Hesse state election. "We're on the right track!" she called out to supporters.

And her party's results over the weekend were a milestone. On Sunday, voters in two German states went to the polls in regional elections. In both Hesse and Bavaria, the extreme right-wing party made significant gains, coming in second place, with 18.4 percent of the vote, in Hesse and in third, with 14.6 percent, in Bavaria. Both results reflected an increase of well over four percentage points over 2018 elections. And beyond that, the votes showed that the AfD is not – as it appeared in the first half of 2022 – sinking into meaninglessness in western Germany. It was only in May of last year that the AfD was even voted out of state parliament in Schleswig-Holstein.

But far from turning into a purely eastern German party, the AfD recovered, and has been on a roll in nationwide public opinion polls in recent weeks. Now, the pair of state elections on Sunday has shown that the party is also able to convert those opinion poll results into election success. The almost 20 percent the AfD received in Hesse is the best result the party has ever achieved in a western German state. And it is reflective of a nationwide trend.

The results come at a time when security officials in Germany have been issuing increasingly unmistakable warnings about the AfD. In summer, following the AfD’s most recent party convention in Magdeburg, Thomas Haldenwang, president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, warned that the influence of anti-democratic currents in the AfD was on the rise . During that convention, party functionaries held racist speeches, spread right-wing extremist conspiracy theories and made use of anti-Semitic codes.

Indifference to Right-Wing Extremism

For AfD voters, however, the fact that the party is suspected of right-wing extremist proclivities by the authorities is of no consequence – as reflected in surveys among AfD supporters in Bavaria and Hesse. According to a poll conducted by Infratest dimap in Bavaria, 85 percent of those queried agreed with the following statement: "I don’t care that elements of the party are considered right-wing extremist as long as they address the correct issues." In Hesse, 80 percent expressed that sentiment.

That indifference likely comes partly from the fact that elements of the party’s electorate are also considered to be right-wing extremist. A study conducted by the Bertelsmann Stiftung ahead of the 2021 national elections found a 29 percent share. More recently, Infratest dimap found that 27 percent of the AfD electorate harbors right-wing extremist tendencies with an additional 25 percent exhibiting clear right-wing tendencies.

At the same time, there is much to suggest that since the AfD’s founding, German voters have grown accustomed to the party. Experts like the right-wing extremist researcher Matthias Quent warn that joint votes between the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and the AfD, as was recently seen in Thuringian state parliament, will lead to the further normalization of the party.

In looking more closely at the state elections on Sunday, it is striking that for most AfD voters, state political issues took a backseat. Seventy-nine percent of AfD voters in Bavaria said the vote in their state was a "message" to the German federal government. And in general, frustration with the governing coalition in Berlin – made up of the center-left Social Democrats, the Greens and the economically liberal Free Democrats – appears significant across all parties. In Hesse, only 28 percent of voters say they are satisfied with the performance of the federal government.

Still, even as many say the election results were a "message," it should not be ignored that many AfD voters cast their ballots for the right-wing party out of conviction. The AfD has developed a core constituency over the years and is better than the other parties at mobilizing its voters via social media.

Worries about Migration

By far the most important issue for AfD voters is migration policy. Ninety-two percent of AfD supporters in Hesse agreed with the statement: "I vote for AfD to get the government to change course on asylum policy." For 51 percent, immigration was the most important factor in deciding who to vote for.

The AfD was likely helped by the fact that the migration issue has increasingly been in the headlines in recent weeks. CDU head Friedrich Merz, for his part, launched a debate about the amount of welfare assistance being provided to rejected asylum applicants.

But the AfD’s resurgence in national polls got started already last fall – at a time when the German population was unsettled by the war in Ukraine, inflation and concerns about the country’s energy supply.

Studies show that AfD voters are generally far more pessimistic when looking to the future than the population at large and are concerned about losing their social status. In Hesse, 90 percent of AfD voters indicated in an Infratest dimap survey that conditions in Germany are cause for concern.

Some 92 percent say they are worried about rising crime, and 93 percent believe there are "too many foreigners." In a recent interview with DER SPIEGEL, political scientist Julia Reuschenbach described how the AfD capitalizes on such fears. "Party functionaries speak regularly about purported external dangers that would accelerate a loss in social status for individuals, such as migration, the European Union or the Green Party, which is allegedly seeking to destroy Germany," Reuschenbach said.