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n 2014, it became the first far-right party to enter the lower house of the country’s parliament since World War II. The party gained 94 out of 709 seats in that lower house in 2017, shaking the traditional balance of the parliamentary government. However, whereas the party won 10.6% of the votes in the southern state of Thuringia in 2014, it captured almost a quarter of the vote in 2019. Headlines began comparing the party’s leader to Adolf Hitler, wondering if its rise marked fascism’s return to Germany.
Clearly, within the last decade, Alternativ for Deutschland (AfD) has become a far-right force to be reckoned with. That is, until October 2020, when the polls found that support for the party in right-leaning eastern Germany had fallen from 24% to 18%, polling behind Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Left party. Within a year, violent incidents perpetrated by far-right extremists and infighting within the party had resulted in a loosening of