00:00Germany has the highest number of seats in the European Parliament with 96.
00:05The country's far-right alternative for Deutschland or AFD now occupies 15 of them,
00:11having brought in just shy of 16% of the German votes.
00:15However, just days before the election,
00:17the party was kicked out of a far-right coalition of parties in the European Parliament
00:22because of statements made by its members that were considered outside acceptable political discourse.
00:28The party has been plagued with accusations of fascism and blatant racism,
00:33along with corruption and even spying for foreign countries.
00:37Yet, that does not appear to have hurt them much.
00:40Frustrated with the German government and EU politics,
00:4360-year-old Monika Trödler in the western German state of Rheinland-Pfalz gave her vote to the AFD.
00:52What we have now isn't a democracy.
00:55Countries no longer have anything to decide for themselves.
00:58Everything is decided from above in Brussels.
01:01I want to be able to have a say as a citizen.
01:04I want to be asked about important decisions.
01:09She believes in the AFD, which prioritizes ethnic Germans
01:13and claims it can win her country's self-determination back.
01:17Distance from Brussels and an anti-migration stance
01:20have proven to be the strongest rallying points for most of the far-right groups across Europe.
01:25The AFD criticized former German Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision
01:30to open the borders to more than one million refugees and economic migrants in 2016.
01:36But that backlash is seen as helping the party enter the federal government for the first time a year later.
01:42The COVID-19 pandemic also provided far-right parties with the opportunity to capitalize
01:48on the people's dismay of how the government was handling the crisis.
01:52Unilaterally implemented lockdown measures and mandatory vaccinations
01:56made many question the country's democracy,
01:59while the ruling coalition government's energy and climate policies
02:03have also been sharply criticized by the right.
02:06The AFD goes further, claiming the policies of Germany's three-party ruling coalition
02:11are not only failing, but a threat to the country's peace and prosperity.
02:16Politicians should be problem solvers.
02:19But here we are now represented by troublemakers.
02:23That means they create the problem and they enforce the problem
02:27and therefore I'm fighting, I'm fighting for our kids, for our people here.
02:32Even if they don't like me, I'm fighting for them.
02:34Yet political theorists say that's exactly what the far-right want people to believe.
02:39They see themselves in a greater conspiracy and Germany is one orchestra of that.
02:44You have to differentiate the complexity of the social world between enemy and foe
02:49to get homogeneity, to get straight categories, to get order.
02:53And this is something they need in their mindset
02:56and which is very attractive to a lot of people
02:59who are afraid of freedom and pluralism and something like that.
03:02Still, the AFD remains the largest opposition party in Germany
03:06and continues to win powerful positions at both the state and EU level.
03:11We will not continue as we did in the mass migration and not in the Green Deal.
03:17However, exactly how much weight the AFD and other Euro-skeptic nationalist parties
03:23will wield in Brussels will depend on their ability to work together.
03:28Natalie Carney, CGTN, Munich, Germany.
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