The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has a clear view on migrants, which it includes in its manifesto: “The AfD considers multiculturalism a serious threat to social peace and the preservation of the nation as a cultural entity.” However, multiculturalism does not seem to pose a serious threat to the AfD itself: in recent months, there has been an increase in messages targeting voters from Germany‘s many immigrant communities.

Ismet Var, 55, born in Turkey, has lived in Germany since childhood, has been a German citizen since 1994 and a staunch supporter of the AfD party since its founding in 2013. His main concerns, he says, are lower taxes and the deportation of immigrants who commit crimes.

The latter, however, is already happening in Germany: the latest statistics show that the center-left government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz increased deportations last year. “Now! Now they’re kicking people out!” says Var, sipping coffee in Kreuzberg, Berlin’s famously muti-culti district. “But they didn’t before.” He believes it took the AfD’s intervention in the German political scene for the government to act.

Var experienced racism when he first came to Germany in the 1970s. He remembers a caretaker in the apartment building telling him that he and his family would not have been there if Hitler had still been in power: “But I didn’t mind. I was young,” he says.

Robert Lambrou: AfD is not xenophobic

In 2023, Robert Lambrou, also an AfD MP in the state of Hesse, founded an organization called “With an Immigrant Background for Germany” for immigrant AfD supporters. The organization’s website says it has 137 members from more than 30 countries and that it is open to all who “declare their loyalty to German culture as the dominant culture and work to preserve the existence of the nation as a cultural entity.”

“My experience of the AfD is that it makes no difference whether one has an immigrant background or not,” Lambrou, 55, whose father was Greek, told DW. “I don’t see the party as xenophobic – we want a sensible immigration policy.”

Refugee children for the AfD

Anna Nguyen has also experienced a lot of racism in Germany. Born near Kassel in 1990 to Vietnamese refugee parents, she now also represents the AfD in the Hesse state parliament. But she insists it is not Germans who treat her with racism – it is mostly people she considers to be Arabs. “During the coronavirus pandemic, it was always people with an immigrant background, probably Arabs, who shouted at me “Heads, heads!” when I was walking around with a Chinese friend of mine,” he said. “It’s true that I get racist comments online – but from the left, even though they call themselves anti-racists.”

Nguyen argues that her party doesn’t care about race and doesn’t strategically target voters like her. “It’s not about immigration background,” she says. “It has to do with the fact that all reasonable people in this country want to prevent this green ideological madness. It’s about whether I can have a good life. Is there insurance? Do we have a stable power supply?”

Targeting new voter groups

Voters with an immigrant background are a demographic reality in Germany: Official statistics for 2023 show that about 12% of the electorate in Germany has a non-German background – that is, about 7.1 million people. In 2016, about 40% of voters with a migrant background supported the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and another 28% supported the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU). But these trends appear to be changing.

According to the German Center for Integration and Immigration Research (DeZIM), which is due to publish a study on the voting habits of immigrants at the end of January, there are no major differences in voting behaviour between people with or without an immigrant background. In the 2017 federal elections, 35% of Germans of Turkish origin voted for the SPD, while 0% voted for the AfD. Now, according to DeZIM, immigrant voters vote for the AfD neither more nor less than Germans without an immigrant background.