ChatGPT says: Alliance Theory would read the rise and evolution of Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a sequence of coalition discoveries, failures, and partial consolidations rather than as a simple story of “radicalization” or ideological drift.
Phase 1. The technocratic protest alliance.
AfD began as a narrow, elite-led coalition: economists, ordoliberal conservatives, small-business owners, and EU-skeptical professionals. Their shared rival was the Brussels monetary regime and the German political class that had imposed euro bailouts. This was a status-high, low-emotion alliance. It lacked mass transitivity. Working-class voters, cultural conservatives, and identity-threatened Germans did not yet see themselves in the same camp.
Alliance Theory predicts such coalitions remain marginal. They have similarity but not scale. No deep interdependence. No shared existential threat narrative.
Phase 2. Migration shock and alliance expansion.
The 2015 refugee crisis rewired the rival map. Suddenly, multiple groups discovered they had the same perceived enemies:
Eastern German status-decliners
Working-class voters facing housing and welfare competition
Cultural conservatives
Anti-Islam activists
Anti-globalist nationalists
Some former Left voters alienated by cosmopolitan elites
Merkel’s government, EU institutions, NGOs, and media formed a single hostile bloc in their eyes. Transitivity exploded. “The enemy of my enemy” logic unified groups that had never coordinated before. AfD became the focal coordinator of this new super-alliance.
This is when AfD stops being a euro-skeptic party and becomes a civilizational-defense party. Alliance Theory predicts that ideology will follow alliance, not the reverse. Immigration, Islam, identity, and sovereignty become central not because of abstract doctrine but because they define the new in-group and out-group most sharply.
Phase 3. Internal factional war.
Once the super-alliance forms, internal hierarchy struggles begin. Technocrats, national-conservatives, and ethnonationalists compete to define the coalition’s moral center. The eastern “Flügel” faction pushes a harder identity boundary. Western moderates fear losing elite bridges and institutional legitimacy.
Alliance Theory says this is inevitable. Large coalitions either:
Broaden and institutionalize, or
Narrow and radicalize to intensify loyalty
AfD oscillates between these strategies. One wing wants transitivity with conservative elites and business. The other wants purity and moral intensity, even at the cost of isolation.
Phase 4. Containment and counter-coalition.
The German establishment responds by building a massive negative-transitivity wall: intelligence surveillance, media cordon sanitaire, party exclusion, moral stigmatization. From an alliance perspective, this is not about “values.” It is about preventing AfD from forming bridging ties with the security state, civil service, or moderate middle class. The goal is to keep AfD’s alliance structurally incomplete.
Alliance Theory predicts the consequence:
External pressure strengthens in-group cohesion, heightens victim narratives, and accelerates radical boundary-hardening in parts of the coalition, especially in East Germany where interdependence among AfD voters is already high.
Future trajectory.
Three structural paths are possible.
Institutional bridging.
If AfD moderates enough to gain transitivity with parts of the conservative establishment, police, military, and business, it could become a governing nationalist party like the Lega or Sweden Democrats. That requires sacrificing its most radical faction and signaling reliability to elite allies.
Regional entrenchment.
AfD becomes a dominant eastern-German mass party, a permanent counter-elite with high loyalty but limited national reach. This is already partly happening. Alliance Theory predicts long-term stability but limited governing power.
Purity spiral.
If exclusion intensifies and bridging remains blocked, the coalition may shrink but radicalize further, becoming an identity-hardened subculture rather than a national contender. Emotional loyalty rises, electoral ceiling falls.
In alliance terms, AfD’s fate does not depend on whether its ideas are “right” or “wrong.” It depends on whether it can expand transitivity beyond a grievance-based mass bloc and become a coordinator between popular anger and institutional power.
Its rise shows how quickly new alliances can crystallize when rival maps realign.
Its future will be determined by whether it can move from insurgent identity-coalition to governing super-alliance without triggering internal schism or external isolation.
