Germany’s Far Right Party Courts Teenagers with TikTok and Gummy Bears
By Jackie Jauregui
Tobi Rölle, a tall, confident youth, leans on a railing outside his high school in a working-class neighborhood of Berlin. Between taking drags of his cigarette during a break from class on a recent afternoon, he discusses his support for Germany’s right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
“Many people say that young people vote for the Greens, but that’s Scheisse,” said Rölle, using his favorite German expletive. He has been particularly incensed by Foreign Affairs Minister Annalena Baerbock’s efforts to allow in more asylum seekers, policies he considers too generous towards migrants. “Where do we put them?”
Like many of his peers, Rölle, 19, looks to the far right for changes that he says prioritize German citizens over migrants from places like Afghanistan and Ukraine. He scoffs at the common assumption that everybody from his generation holds progressive views on issues such as climate change and LGBTQ+ rights.
In June, 16-year-olds were allowed to vote for the first time in Germany. Conservatives had opposed lowering the voting age from 18, thinking that younger voters would support left-of-center parties. But that proved wrong.
Instead, the rightist AfD received 16 percent of votes from those under 25 — up 11 percent in elections five years earlier. Coming in a close second among youth was the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which received 17 percent. The left of center Green Party had the greatest loss over the same period — down 23 percent — garnering only 11 percent of the youth vote.
One reason might be that teenagers are increasingly relying on social media and the internet for their political information. The AfD platform spans the spectrum of conservative issues — climate change denial, opposition to LGBTQ rights, and a purported rise in crime — but the party is increasingly defined by its anti-immigration stance. Rölle says he often reads articles on Google or watches YouTube videos before clicking on recommended content.
To promote its political platform to a young audience, the AfD is very active on TikTok, with one of its accounts — tied to the Germany parliament or Bundestag — accumulating almost half a million followers and 7.7 million likes. The AfD Bundestag Instagram has over 241,000 followers.
“Home and identity only exist with us: the AfD is number one among young people,” is one of its popular slogans.
The AfD was started in 2013 by members of the CDU who were more economically conservative than the German mainstream and wanted to leave the European Union. Since then, its has shifted further toward right-wing and populist politics, sometimes downplaying Nazi war crimes. The German domestic intelligence service classified the party as a right-wing extremist group in early 2024.
It draws most of its support from voters in the former East Germany, who feel that they have been left behind economically. The AfD polls almost 30 percent among all age demographics in the region.
Lichtenberg, where Rölle lives, is a predominantly working-class district just east of Berlin’s expensive, highly touristed center and it is one area where the party is gaining followers.
Slavia Kravez, a 33-year-old Ukrainian psychologist who works as a Lichtenberg town hall member’s assistant, recalls members from various political parties, including the AfD, talking to teenagers at a local high school in April 2022. The teenagers’ level of engagement with the politicians really surprised her.
“It was a huge shock to see that at the end of this discussion, out of about 100 people, at least six or seven were taking photos and videos with the AfD… even [making content] for TikTok,” Kravez said. “Politicians are presented like superheroes instead of leaders of a community.”
The AfD’s social media presence is clear — even to those who don’t interact with it or share their political views. Marlene Noetzel, a 25-year-old personnel and human resources management graduate student, said she is disgusted by the passion of the party’s online fans.
“I used to like the blue heart emoji,” said Noetzel of the support symbol with the party’s color that floods social media posts. “Now whenever I see comments with those, my stomach turns because I know what they mean.”
Receiving such blue hearts under posts is Alice Weidel, the AfD’s fervorous federal spokesperson. The Bundestag TikTok platform features interview snippets of her mouthing the party’s talking points, including urging the federal government to deport those who “enter without a passport” and blaming the rise in rape, knife crimes, and gang rapes on the influx of migrants.
The right’s concern about foreign-born criminals grew louder after a knife attack in Manheim on May 31. In a market square in the northwestern German city, a 25-year-old Afghan-born man stabbed six people at an anti-Islam rally, among them a local AfD politician and a police officer. A week later, Chancellor Olaf Schultz gave a speech in parliament denouncing the act of terrorism and assuring Germans that foreign-born perpetrators will be deported. Even so, the right took the opportunity to uphold the attack as an example of the harm migrants cause in Germany.
“Your migration policy does not protect the politically persecuted. Rather, it protects criminals and asylum scammers,” AfD spokesperson Weidel said in a speech to the Bundestag that received 88,000 views on TikTok. The video’s caption ends with the hashtag #Manheim.
Young people are also echoing this xenophobia on social media. A young woman posted a video to Instagram at the celebrity hangout Club Pony, on the northwestern German island Sylt, dancing along to a combination of House music and partygoers chanting “Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus” — meaning Germany for Germans, foreigners out.
A tall man in a white button-up shirt and navy cardigan — only one among hundreds present — can be seen doing the Hitler salute. Though the public outcry against these obvious nods to Nazism was stark enough for the Instagram user to remove her video and lose her job, it is becoming increasingly common for young Germans to be unashamed in expressing such ideas.
Enlisting teenager support, the AfD party has campaigned heavily at high schools in the former East Berlin, often receiving an enthusiastic reception. Charlotte Seidler, 15, recalls that representatives gave out gummy bears along with their flyers outside her high school, also in Lichtenberg.
“There are many in my class showing signs they will vote for them. Others flat out say it,” Seidler said. “One boy exhibits traits of Nazism, like commenting negatively on darker skinned students. He did the Hitler salute in class and was reprimanded for that.”
Berlin’s population has reached roughly 20 percent foreign born, as of 2022.
High school students from immigrant family backgrounds say that support for the AfD goes hand in hand with unabashedly racist views. A 16-year-old who gave his name as Dean M. spoke of one classmate in particular who supports the AfD.
“He said people like me should not have been let into this country, and that he doesn’t really like Black people,” said the Chinese student. “I come from another land, and we don’t look like ‘real Germans’ to him. Real Germans have blonde or brown hair and blue eyes.”
That same classmate told a Muslim student that teachers and students shouldn’t be permitted to wear hijabs, female head coverings.
Recent high school graduate Sebastian Wiegandt condemns the AfD’s platform. The party, he says, is constantly spreading negative — and often false — stories about migrants, fanning the flame of xenophobia.
“If that is what you see online most of the time, you’ll believe that everyone who looks like them [commits crime]” Wiegandt said.
Concerns about misinformation are not new. Since the beginning of a full-scale war in Ukraine over two years ago, there has been evidence of Russian propaganda circulating online, fueling the ill will. Russian actors bought internet domain names nearly identical to reputable media outlets, made social media accounts impersonating them, and copied their website formats to post articles that promote the Kremlin narrative. They have claimed that Ukraine is a neo-Nazi state, among other things to make Westerners question why their governments are supporting Ukraine in the current war.
A 15-year-old boy with rectangular black glasses, a black oversized soccer jersey and skinny jeans, said he turned away from the mainstream CDU after they supported a national mask mandate during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“[Chancellor] Olaf Schultz and his coalition are doing lots of bullshit,” said the teenager, who did not want to give his name. “I think Germany is okay as it is. We shouldn’t be flying the Ukrainian flag or the gender flag instead of the German flag.”
Many AfD supporters voice a similar sense of feeling abandoned by the German government. In turn, they are resentful towards the refugees and the international conflicts the country supports financially — such as the Russo-Ukrainian War. There are about 1.1 million Ukrainian refugees in the country, most receiving a stipend and a temporary stay status. Germany also recently committed to allocate two percent of GDP towards military spending, driven by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The situation in Germany is complicated by chronic labor shortages. A report released in 2022 using German government statistics showed that 70 percent of new jobs in the country were being filled by foreign workers.
“These guys keep saying Ausländer raus [foreigners out],” complained Bashir Al-Sultan, a 27-year-old former gym teacher originally from Syria, who is now working as a driver in Berlin. “If we all left, the city would stop. The buses would stop. The taxis would stop. They need us.”
Hanna Liashenko, a 22-year-old Ukrainian artist who formerly attended university in Kharkiv, fled to Berlin after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. She remembered Berliners’ warm reception at the time. But public support for Ukraine declined in the last year along with rising hostility to migrants.
She thought back to a young boy from her neighborhood looking her directly in the eye before staking an AfD yard sign across the street. Seeing the AfD banners and fliers in her neighborhood, she feels as though their anger is personally directed against her.
“You feel more threatened here than in Ukraine, because there you know what the dangers are,” Liashenko said. “Here, you don’t know if the person in the S-Bahn is with or against you.”
Mahmoud Mandou, a 33-year-old Syrian engineer who has been in Germany since 2019, attributes rising hostility toward foreigners to the far-right’s relentless anti-immigrant rhetoric. He recalls a recent incident when he was unlocking his bicycle from a nearly empty rack near a drug store. A man approached, putting his bicycle alongside Mandou’s, and spit next to it. “When he did it again, I knew it was on purpose,” he said.
Despite these types of microaggressions, Mandou likes to focus on the kindness he has received.
He attended a recent dinner at Give Something Back to Berlin — Open Kitchen, a Neukölln organization that brings Germans together with migrants.
“Life taught me, that when I see people like this, I try to understand them. Especially the young — they don’t have the deep-rooted values of adults,” Mandou said. “I believe in the good Germans.”
Jackie Jauregui is an undergraduate student of Linguistics, Spanish, German, and Journalism at University of California, Santa Barbara who is reporting from Berlin this summer.
