Its main appeal is its opposition to Angela Merkel's welcoming policy toward migrants.When it was formed in 2013, the AfD's main thrust was its opposition to bailouts of indebted European Union member states like Greece. In at least three German states, extremist elements of the far-right Alternative for Germany are threatening to take over the party. August 2019, 12.34 Uhr: Die Landesvorsitzende der AfD … Erfolgreich rechte Politik macht jetzt die AfD. Like Donald Trump or populist leaders in eastern Europe, the leaders of the AfD display a conspicuous hostility toward the mainstream media. Although nominally favoring a targeted immigration policy along the Canadian model, lead candidate Alice Weidel has said the party wants to achieve "negative immigration" to Germany. And it is being created in the heart of the West.”Founded in 2013, the AfD is at the forefront of a far-right resurgence in Europe, eclipsing the likes of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, NPD, which is more than half a century old.The NPD, said Kai Arzheimer, a professor of politics at the University of Mainz, is “a classic right-wing extremist party”. “It’s not okay to immediately surrender and confess crimes if it’s not necessary,” he said. Founded in 2013, the AfD is at the forefront of a far-right resurgence in Europe, eclipsing the likes of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, NPD, which is more than half a century old. Er hat sich doch auch nicht mit der AfD in Verbindung gesetzt bei diesem Projekt. “That’s Trumpism.”Frohnmaier said AfD’s inroads in the Balkans and the ex-Yugoslav diaspora in Germany had made mainstream parties “nervous” because of the diaspora vote power.“We are really trying to have good relations especially with the countries in the East,” he said.For decades, the Balkans was seen as exporting instability to Western Europe. The AfD, on the other hand, is “much closer to the radical right-wing populist party template.”The most radical elements of the AfD are its youth organisation, Young Alternative, JA, and the Wing [Flugel], a hardline faction that has frequently been at odds with more conventional conservatives within the party. But over time, it has become, first and foremost, an anti-immigration party. You can find more information in our data protection declaration.DW looks at the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, the third-largest group in the Bundestag. Reporters who call the press hotline at the party's headquarters to request information often get a pre-recorded message telling them to "try again later. The rise of the AfD has, in any case, coincided with the decline of far-right parties like the NPD into virtual insignificance. (28.10.2019) Die NPD verschwindet in der politischen Bedeutungslosigkeit. Parovic took barely 11,500 votes, or 0.32 per cent, yet thanks to his alliance with Frohnmaier he and his party colleagues – who are not represented in the Serbian parliament – have been invited to attend conferences in the Bundestag and the European Parliament.In an interview with BIRN, Frohnmaier said the fact the AfD and Parovic’s party were not in power was a “problem” but that he believed Serbia could take on the role of “bridge” between the West and East.The AfD as a party backed another candidate in the 2017 election – Bosko Obradovic of the right-wing Dveri party, which has seven MPs in the Serbian parliament and has emerged as a fierce critic of the country’s ruling conservatives under President Aleksandar Vucic.Obradovic was a guest of an AfD leader, Jorg Meuthen, at his Stuttgart office in March 2017.“They talked about family policy, problems with Brussels bureaucracy and migration,” Dragana Trifkovic, a senior member of Dveri, told BIRN.Trifkovic said the two parties had not met formally since then, and noted that in March 2019 an AfD delegation visited the Serbian parliament but met only MPs of the ruling coalition.In October, AfD deputy and head of the party’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Armin-Paul Hampel, went a step further in his second visit to Belgrade in five months, meeting Marko Djuric, Serbia’s pointman on Kosovo, the majority Albanian former Serbian province that declared independence in 2008.Unlike the AfD’s more formal Serbian outreach, the party’s mission in Croatia relies heavily on the “private initiative” of Mandic, Frohnmaier told BIRN.Via the right-wing Croatian talkshow host Velimir Bujanec, in July 2018 Mandic was introduced to two right-wing Croatian MPs – former Culture Minister Zlatko Hasanbegovic and retired General Zeljko Glasnovic.Mandic was interviewed by Bujanec on his talkshow, Bujica, that month, telling Bujanec: “Germany has been enslaved by anti-fascists.” Such a choice of words would resonate with conservative and right-wing Croats who play down the crimes committed by the fascist WWII Croatian puppet state and pour scorn on liberals as the ideological heirs of the Yugoslav communists.In April 2019, Mandic and AfD deputy Dietmar Friedhoff organised a panel discussion in Freiberg regarding ‘The Future of Croats in a Nationalistic Germany’. The AfD wants to seal the EU's borders, institute rigorous identity checks along Germany's national borders and set up holding camps abroad to prevent migrants from leaving for Germany in the first place. But Marko Dimitrijevic, of Serbian Action, told BIRN: “Of course we don’t like NPD’s contacts with those anti-Serbs, but that still doesn’t pose an obstacle to our good cooperation with the NPD.”Dimitrijevic said Serbian Action had cooperated with the NPD on joint panel discussions in Belgrade, on publication of the English-language online magazine The Spear and a demonstration in the Czech capital, Prague, to mark the 20th anniversary of the NATO bombing of Serbia during the 1998-99 Kosovo war.BIRN has discovered that Serbian Action has been mentioned several times in annual reports regarding right-wing extremism drawn up by the domestic intelligence agency of the German federal state of Saxony.Dimitrijevic said that collaboration with the NPD was based on “a shared awareness of the fateful cohesion of all nations of Europe, which represents our wider homeland.”That ‘homeland’, he said, “is under Atlantic occupation of NATO, the EU and the banking system.”This occupation, in turn, “encourages the settlement of migrants in Europe”, the Islamisation of the continent and the promotion of “anti-Christian, liberal-fundamentalist and cultural Marxist ideas”, he said.The perceived threat posed by Islam is used heavily by both AfD and the NPD in their Balkan networking, adjusted according to the target.With Serbs, the accent is on Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians, many of whom declare themselves as Muslims, broke away in war two decades ago and declared independence in 2008 with the backing of the major Western powers.With Croats, the focus is on the position of their ethnic kin in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Croats complain they are subordinate to the more numerous Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks.Parovic, the AfD contact in Serbia, said it came down to the same thing – in the 1990s, he said, the West “declared Muslims in Kosovo and in Bosnia and Herzegovina as good Muslims”.Frohnmaier said that Germans could “learn from Serbs and their experience with Islamic terrorism, especially during the 1990s,” and he backed “peaceful” Serbian efforts in Kosovo “to take your country back.”At the European Congress of the NPD’s youth wing, in May 2018, Ivan Bilokapic argued that the fight against Islam in Bosnia and Kosovo had the potential to reconcile Serbs and Croats.Bilokapic is a Germany-based Croatian nationalist and board member of the Europe Terra Nostra, the official European political foundation of the far-right Alliance for Peace and Freedom.He told BIRN that Serbia and Croatia should overcome “shallow chauvinism”.