How Germany’s far-right AfD is courting the voters it promises to deport

On September 6, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 43.8% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, more than double the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU)‘s 17.2%. Turnout was 77.8%, the highest in the state’s history of free elections. The party campaigned on a platform that included a deportation and remigration offensive, and pursuing “all legal avenues” to limit Islamic expression.

Saxony-Anhalt is a broadly rural German state, with a very small migrant population and minimal incentive to campaign to them. While the AfD’s record-breaking result in Saxony-Anhalt had little to do with migrant voters, things will be very different when Berlin goes to the polls on September 20.

An opinion poll published on September 10 puts the AfD on track for 18% of the capital’s vote, double its 9.1% result from 2023. This would put AfD within three points of the lead in a neck-and-neck race, in a city where 42.3% of residents have a migration background.

While the AfD was able to win Saxony-Anhalt without migrant voters, they cannot afford to ignore them in Berlin.

Read more: Even if it doesn’t form government, the far-right AfD has shaken Germany’s political establishment to the core

Courting the immigrant vote

The AfD has been chasing the immigrant vote for years, with TikTok and Turkish-language material mainly aimed at people with Russian and Turkish roots. These are long-settled immigrant communities, many of whom are German citizens with voting rights. The AfD targets them with a message that some experts have characterised as one of assurance: you, the established communities, are not the problem, the new arrivals are.

However, the AfD’s Turkish-language campaigning is not turning into votes. A July 2026 panel work from The German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM) found the AfD rated the least electable of all parties by voters with a migration background.

Another DeZIM report has highlighted the falling turnout of voters with Turkish, Middle Eastern and North African roots, reading it as a possible warning of longer-term estrangement from the party system as a whole.

A 2025 study on migrant voting preferences throughout Germany put the AfD at 19%, third behind the CDU and SPD. It was, however, the strongest party among voters of Polish origin and among ethnic German resettlers. So the party does win migrant votes, but not currently among the German Turks it is courting this month.

These voters do, however, carry a grievance the mainstream has not addressed. DeZIM’s directors have documented what they call “competition for recognition”: the way groups treated as second-order end up in comparison and conflict with one another, and not against the people ranking them.

Political scientist Özgür Özvatan has traced this dynamic in Turkish-German belonging, where advancement is often pursued and achieved, but does not always turn into widespread, lasting acceptance from mainstream society.

Read more: Culture is the far right’s secret weapon – and it’s winning over some of Europe’s most educated youth

Rewarding good behaviour

Something structural sits beneath this, and it is not confined to Germany.

The older far right defined belonging by descent, which has a built-in ceiling. Its potential electorate was fixed and shrank with every naturalisation, while every migrant was a permanent opponent.

What has spread across the continent since 2015 is a different political design, where belonging is earned through conduct. Today’s far-right messaging is not always ethnic or cultural, the message now is: work hard, assimilate, toe the line, and you can belong. Anyone, migrant or otherwise, can cross this boundary through their behaviour.

The French overseas territory of Mayotte shows this design at its clearest. An island territory in the Indian Ocean, Mayotte is 95% Muslim, but it gave far-right candidate Marine Le Pen her best result in the country in 2022, with 42.89% of the first-round vote, up from 2.77% in 2012.

Researchers on the MIGRAF project see this as Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) party deliberately stripping race from its message overseas: on the island, RN does not attack Islam, it attacks migrants from the nearby Comoro Islands.

Read more: Populists claim to speak for ‘the people’ – but who are they actually talking about?

French Muslims voting for Le Pen against Muslim migrants might seem unthinkable. However, it makes sense if you consider how the boundary of belonging has changed. The question is not who you are, but which side of a bureaucratic boundary you stand on.

Spain’s far right plays a similar tune in a different key. Speaking in Gran Canaria in 2018, leader of the far-right Vox party Santiago Abascal drew a distinction between different kinds of immigrant: those from Latin America, who share much of Spain’s language, religion and worldview, and those from Islamic countries.

Vox built an international project around this exception, dubbed the “Iberosfera” (Iberosphere). Analysts have interpreted it as a form of “ethnic Hispanicism”.

Sweden has perhaps moved the furthest here, in its decision to place greater legal emphasis on migrants’ conduct or way of life. The Swedish Aliens act, which came into force on July 13, 2026, allows the Swedish Migration Agency can refuse or revoke residence permits on grounds of “deficient conduct”: behaviour that breaks no law but contravenes rules society wishes to uphold.

Legal scholars have highlighted that the standard is too vague to be applied predictably or equally.

Read more: Immigration in Sweden: how the country went from one of Europe’s most welcoming, to one of its most restrictive

Acceptance is fickle

A political offer of this kind depends on a far-right party’s voters and members accepting an exception to their principles. Support for such an idea is difficult to maintain, and in Spain, it has caused a deep rift in Vox’s base.

In August 2019, an employers’ association called for recruiting workers abroad, preferably from Latin America. A Vox deputy from Málaga responded by tweeting that it made no difference whether demographic replacement “came wearing Djellabas or carrying machetes”, then deleted the post.

The row ran through the party for years, but in January 2026, Vox quietly removed “Latinos por Abascal” from its website, a campaign launched three years earlier to capture Spain’s Hispanic voters.

Conditional belonging has a short shelf-life. It works as a recruitment device, but when the base radicalises past it, the people who were once welcomed are reclassified as what they were before. Spain is two years ahead of Germany on this cycle.

The AfD leaves itself the same room for manoeuvre, though as things currently stand, its position is not clear. Its Saxony-Anhalt programme puts “remigration” at the centre, but the party insists the term covers only the lawful return of foreigners with no right to remain, rejecting the deportation of German citizens with a migration background as unconstitutional.

However, constitutional lawyers reading the Saxony-Anhalt text see an expulsion policy resting on an ethnic idea of the people. No voters being courted this month – whether in Saxony-Anhalt or in Berlin – have been clearly told which definition will apply.

When Berlin goes to the polls, some voters from migrant backgrounds will decide the warning is not meant for them, but for somebody else. If nothing else, producing that decision is what AfD’s strategy is meant to do.

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!