“What my parents taught me is that they used to live in peace and calm, without having to have any fear in their own country,” says 19-year-old Nick. “I would like to live in a country where I don’t have to be afraid.”

I meet him in a small bar on a street corner in the ex-mining town of Freiberg, Saxony – where he is playing darts.

It’s a cold, foggy night in February with just over two weeks to go until Germany’s national election.

Nick and his friend Dominic, who is 30, are backers or sympathetic to Alternative für Deutschland – a party that has been consistently polling second in Germany for more than a year and a half, as the far-right here and elsewhere in Europe attracts an increasing number of young people, particularly men, into its orbit.

One particular reason why Nick – and many other young German men – say they are afraid is the number of attacks in Germany involving suspects who were asylum seekers – most recently, the fatal stabbing of a toddler and a man in a park in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg. Immigration is now Nick and Dominic’s main concern, although they don’t oppose it in all forms.

“The people who integrate, who learn, who study here, do their work – I have no problems with them,” says Dominic, though he is critical of anyone he sees as taking advantage of the asylum system.

“But these days such statements are seen as hostile,” says Dominic. “You’re called a Nazi because of Germany’s past.”

The AfD – which has long been accused of anti-migrant rhetoric – is celebrating endorsements from tech billionaire, Elon Musk, who owns the social media site X. He has hosted a live discussion with party leader Alice Weidel on the platform and dialled into a party rally.

Now, as Germany waits to see just how well the far-right does in the upcoming election, the question is why so many young men in particular are being drawn to the far-right and what the consequences could be for a country that’s deeply conscious of its Nazi past.

Pew research in 2024 found that 26% of German men had positive views of the AfD compared to 11% of women, and the share of men holding this opinion has risen 10 points since 2022.

In the elections for the European Parliament in 2024, according to German exit polls the number of under 24-year-olds, both male and female, who voted for the AfD in Germany rose to 16 per cent, up by 11 points from 2019.

This comes at a time of rising general anxiety among young people according to a recent study by the German Institute for Generational Research.

In a sample size of 1,000 Germans aged 16 to 25, anxiety levels were the highest amongst respondents who class themselves as far-right while they were the lowest amongst people who put themselves in the middle of the political spectrum.

Women were more likely to be concerned for their rights and those of minority groups while men were found to be more worried about conservative values that are less based around rights.

Dr Rüdiger Maas, from the German think tank the Institute for Generational Research, says parties on the left often focus on themes such as feminism, equality and women’s rights.

“Overall, men don’t see themselves in these themes,” he tells us. “That is why they have a tendency to vote further right.”

Hard, populist right parties have also done well in countries such as France, Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Italy.

“Sixty per cent of young men under 30 would consider voting for the far-right in EU countries and this is much higher than the share among women,” says Prof Abou-Chadi, in analysis drawn from a subset of the 2024 European Election Study.

As well as gender, migration and economic issues, social media is playing a part. Platforms like TikTok allow political groups to bypass mainstream, traditional media, which the far-right regard as hostile.

It’s clear that AfD “dominates” TikTok when compared to other German parties, says Mauritius Dorn from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). It has 539,000 followers on its parliamentary account, compared to 158,000 for the SPD who currently have the most seats in the German parliament.

And it isn’t just official accounts but a “considerable number of unofficial fan accounts also help to disseminate the party’s content”, says Mr Dorn.

Through setting up 10 “persona-based” accounts with different user profiles, they found, “those users who are more on the right-wing spectrum… see a lot of AfD content whereas users from the leftist spectrum see a more diverse set of political content.”

TikTok has said it doesn’t “differentiate” between the right, left or centre of politics and works to stay at the “forefront” of tackling misinformation.

Dorn observes that other parties recognised sites such as TikTok “too late”, which means they’re playing catch-up in establishing a strong footprint on the platform.

We’ve met one AfD influencer, Celina Brychcy – a 25-year-old TikTokker who has more than 167,000 followers – 53% of whom are male, with 76% aged between 18 and 35.

She mainly shares dance, trend and lifestyle videos, but also pro-AfD content.

Ms Brychcy says she doesn’t make money from promoting the AfD but does it because she believes in the cause and wants to “get a message across”.

Her political ideals include wanting the return of military service, more support for mothers who want or need to stay at home and stricter border controls.

When I press her about whether her views amount to a rejection of multiculturalism she replied no, but believes people should “integrate.”

“There are certain people who just don’t fit in with us Germans,” she added but repeatedly insisted she is not racist and doesn’t have “anything against foreigners.”

Ms Brychcy is also against “role reversal” when it comes to the way men and women dress.

A reaction against “gender ideology” is another issue identified by Tarik Abou-Chadi, a professor of European Politics at the University of Oxford, as feeding far-right support amongst the young – something that is echoed by the Institute for Generational Research.

They asked first-time voters whether they found the LGBTQ+ trend “übertrieben”, which literally means “exaggerated” or over the top. The respondents who showed the highest level of agreement with that question were those who planned to support the AfD.

When I challenge Ms Brychcy over whether that could be seen as retrograde, she replied that “biologically speaking, we are men and women” and thinks people should present accordingly.

Ms Brychcy tells me she has lost a couple of friends because of her politics – and now mostly spends time with those of a similar outlook.

She doesn’t agree with those who view the AfD as a dangerous movement – rather one that would offer genuine, radical change.

When I ask Ms Brychcy if she considers herself as far-right, she says that on certain issues – such as border control and crime, “Definitely yes”.

It’s a striking reply, particularly as often, the label of far-right is rejected by supporters of the AfD, including by the party leader, Alice Weidel, who insists she heads a conservative, libertarian movement.

With the horrors of the Nazis further and further in the past, this is a generation that’s grown up with parties like the AfD – whether that’s on TV talk shows or in parliament after the AfD got its first MPs in 2017.

Prof Abou-Chadi believes that the far-right, generally, has become more normalised to the point, “They don’t seem so extreme any more.”

That’s despite party scandals such as a talisman of the AfD’s hard right, Björn Höcke, being fined twice last year for using a Nazi slogan, though he denied doing so knowingly.

The AfD, in three German states, is classified as right-wing extremist by authorities – including in Saxony, a designation the party unsuccessfully challenged in court.

It’s a state where the number of “right-wing extremist individuals” had reached a “new high” – according to a report released last year by Saxony’s domestic intelligence service – that showed data back to 2015.

In a shopping mall in the city of Chemnitz in Saxony, we meet a group of young men who – while they won’t go on the record – tell us they’re right wing.

Dressed in black, with uniformly short hair, they express beliefs that homosexuality is wrong and fear that the German “race” is under threat because of the growing migrant community.

They question narratives about their country’s past, seemingly a reference to the Nazi era.

Diana Schwitalla has been teaching history and social studies for eight years. She says she has had to confront a case of Holocaust denial in the classroom and has heard other troubling remarks.

“We hear the Second World War was actually a good thing, and there was a reason people died then – and that this is good. Hitler is described as a good man,” says Ms Schwitalla.

She adds, “Many students… very young students, {who} say it doesn’t matter who I vote for, they’ll do what they want ‘up there’ anyway. The question of who’s ‘up there’, I don’t get an answer to that.”

We met her over the course of two days – including at an adult vocational college in Freiberg that sits on the grounds of a former Nazi concentration camp. Jewish women, brought from Auschwitz, were used for slave labour here to make parts for aeroplanes.

We did hear some talk of opposition to the levels of immigration into Germany plus a desire for national pride.

The first day we met Ms Schwitalla, she is helping to organise a mock election for the students as a way of engaging them about democracy at another college site in the town of Flöha – about 15 miles away from Freiberg.

We spoke to Cora, Melina and Joey, all 18.

Cora says she has heard men of her age express a desire for women to be in the home harking back to a time “when women took care of the children and when the husband comes home from work, the food is cooked”. She likens it to the so-called “Trad Wife” trend of adhering to traditional gender roles.

Cora and Melina voice fears about a rollback of women’s rights – including on abortion, even – remarkably – the right to vote. “Luckily that’s not being discussed in politics yet,” says Melina, “but I’ve heard discussions about women not being allowed to vote in elections anymore.”

A small group of students line up to vote around lunchtime and we watch as the results come in with “Die Linke” scoring top – the left party that’s relatively popular amongst the young but polling at only around five per cent nationwide.

The AfD came second, reinforcing what Prof Abou-Chadi has found, that, “younger people are much more likely to go for a further left or further right party than a centrist one”.

The AfD, whose signature issues include security, borders and migrant crime, are now even embracing the concept of “remigration” – a buzz-word in Europe’s far-right that’s widely understood to mean mass deportations.

Speaking to people in Germany, it is clear that support for the AfD can not just be read as some form of protest vote, even if there is frustration with the parties that have traditionally governed Germany. Celina, Dominic and Nick – and others we spoke to – genuinely hope and believe that the AfD could set Germany on the path of radical change.

It’s still the case that other parties will not go into coalition with the AfD but in January a non-binding motion was passed in the German parliament thanks to AfD votes for the first time.

Prof Abou-Chadi believes in the longer, -term, there could be an even more seismic change.

“And as soon as the more mainstream parties start giving up the ‘firewall’ or cordon sanitaire the far-right will start cannibalising the right.

“It’s very likely that, in many or most European countries, the far-right parties will be the main party on the right – or already are,” he says.

Parties like the AfD have worked hard to try and normalise themselves in the eyes of the public.

While there are people in Germany and Europe who view the far-right as an extremist, even anti-democratic, force – it appears that the ‘normalisation’ effort is working, not least of all among the young.

Top picture credit: Getty

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