The Far Right Is Winning. These Young Germans Show Us Why.

DRESDEN, Germany — On a freezing Monday lunchtime, Lilly Baginski trudges through Dresden’s Grosser Garten park and talks about the “national community.” The 23-year-old wears her blond hair in two severe braids threaded with a wreath of daisies. She’s a member of the Young Nationalists, the youth wing of the extreme-right German party The Homeland.

Baginski dreams of a Germany in which everyone knows their place. For “culturally alien foreigners,” she sees no place at all. She wants to “revolutionize the system.” She believes her movement is stronger than ever. “There are more and more of us. We’ve grown fivefold,” she says. “Young people are taking to the streets en masse for German culture.”

Baginski is one of hundreds of young Germans who have joined far-right groups in recent years. Some came looking for community and adventure, others for clearly defined enemies. Loose groups evolved into political networks. Political parties try to bind their members to them.

Daniel Fiss knows how that works. Now in his early 30s, he once moved in the orbit of the Young Nationalists before rising through the ranks of the Identitarian movement, an ethnonationalist organization classified by the German domestic intelligence agency as an “extremist” entity. Today, he helps organize for the far-right Alternative for Germany party in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. His goal: political power.

Fiss arrives a little late for an interview in the regional capital in late July. A delivery of campaign leaflets had held him up, he says. “I had to lug boxes around.” A few weeks later, in early September, his party will come in first with 38% of the vote in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, part of a wave of success for the far right that will shake up the political establishment.

Erik Ahrens was one of the first to test how the far right could best reach young voters. He developed a social media strategy for AfD politician Maximilian Krah. Millions of users watched his videos: “Real men are right-wing, and then you’ll get the girl, too.” Ahrens wanted to turn Krah into one of the country’s most powerful politicians. Then he walked away.

Today, Ahrens is sitting in a Barcelona café with his fiancée, Emma Mäckel, who also turned her back on the far right, warning of the methods he once used himself. Right-wing ideology works like a drug, he says: “It has to become ever more radical to keep producing the same high.” He believes certain parts of Germany have already been lost to the far right — perhaps forever.

Baginski, Fiss, Ahrens and Mäckel tell the story of how the German far-right emerged from the shadows and pushed into the German mainstream in large part by radicalizing the country’s youth.

The shift has been visible in schools and at the ballot box. Student councils in eastern Germany are warning of an erosion of democratic values. In the 2021 federal election, voters aged 18 to 24 primarily backed the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats. Four years later, the far-left Left party and the AfD came out on top in that age group.

In a September election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD raked in the largest number of votes. Among voters aged 18 to 24, 41% backed the right-wing party, compared to 17% in 2021. It then repeated the performance in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. There, thanks to efforts of activists like Fiss, 36% of voters under 24 voted for the far right, up from 14% five years earlier. Nationally, the AfD is the most popular party, polling at 28% — far ahead of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats, at 20%.

Radical right-wing youth culture is no longer a niche phenomenon, says David Begrich, an expert on Germany’s far right. Instagram and TikTok offer a glimpse into the bedrooms of the nation’s young people: Young women pose with “White Power” gestures. Young men appear masked and ready for battle, spreading nationalist slogans.

The German story broadly follows a European trend. A University of Amsterdam study published this year titled “The Kids Are Alt Right?” found that young Europeans not only expressed less support for liberal democracy than older age groups, but were also more likely to back far-right parties in the most recent European Parliament elections. Challenging a long-held assumption, the authors concluded that “the younger generation may not be a bulwark against democratic backsliding.”

In Germany, these findings carry profound historical weight. For decades, young people were seen as a safeguard against society sliding back into its authoritarian past. In the 1960s, the student movement demanded a far more rigorous reckoning with the horrors of National Socialism, and universities became incubators of a new liberal zeitgeist. Since then, Germany has treated ideas such as national pride with exceptional caution.

Now, however, attitudes among the country’s youngest generation appear to be shifting. In a survey of several thousand schoolchildren in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, 51% called for “greater courage to embrace a strong sense of national identity.” One in three said Germany had become dangerously “overrun by foreigners.” Around a quarter went further, saying the country once again needed a Führer — a leader who would rule with a strong hand.

To German ears, the wording carries an unmistakable and deeply unsettling echo of the Nazi era.

For decades, Germany assumed that its youngest citizens would be the strongest defense against a return to an authoritarian past that convulsed not just the country but the world. Today, parts of that generation are moving in the opposite direction — drawn to a far right that has learned how to turn rebellion into political influence.

It’s a shift with particular resonance in Germany, to be sure. But it’s one happening in many other parts of the West, too. The stories of Baginski, Fiss, Ahrens and Mäckel help explain why.

THE TRUE BELIEVER

How does a teenager with little interest in politics join a neo-Nazi group? Lilly Baginski grew up in a small community south of Ludwigshafen, a German city on the Rhine River. She describes an orderly home and a normal teenage life. Baginski began training as a nurse. Photographs from that period show her in tight-fitting jeans, glossy makeup and large earrings, a cigarette in her hand.

Today, the 23-year-old prefers skirts or long dresses. She likes the “typically völkisch appearance,” she once said, using a term evoking an almost folkloric ethnic nationalism. Her clothes now signal where she stands politically.

During a walk through Dresden, she describes her first conscious encounter with politics as a moment of mistrust. During the coronavirus pandemic, the German government restricted public life. The university hospital where Baginski was working imposed an emergency regime. “I didn’t like the system, the way orders were sent down from above and our freedom was restricted,” she says.

At the same time, she adds, her home started to feel foreign. In her part of Ludwigshafen, she says, there is “no German place left where you can go for lunch.” “Maybe there’s a bakery, but then next door there’s an Arab bakery.” Online, she read texts critical of migration and watched parliamentary debates. “The more you go out and see what is happening, or read about it, the more it occupies your mind,” she says.

Baginski is not alone in her way of thinking. Thirty-eight percent of young people in the eastern states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia identified migration as their main concern, according to a study of young people by the Sinus Institute, a German research institute. Only fear of war ranked higher.

Then, in May 2024, something happened that Baginski now describes as a decisive moment: An Afghan man attacked the prominent anti-Islam campaigner Michael Stürzenberger with a knife, killing a police officer who tried to stop him. Baginski happened to be in the city where the attack took place. She had considered going to see a rally Stürzenberger had planned to hold. For Baginski, the attack fitted into a worldview that was hardening by the day.

She joined a small youth organization unaffiliated with any party. The young people went hiking together and organized demonstrations. Their causes included support for traditional family roles, national pride and “remigration,” the repatriation of foreigners to their countries of ethnic origin.

Footage from a rally in Stuttgart in March 2025 shows Baginski holding a placard bearing a poem popular among neo-Nazis. It invokes violence against those in government: “For now you still sit up there, you cowardly creatures, paid by the enemy and mocked by the people. But one day justice will prevail again, then the people will pass judgment, and may God have mercy on you.”

Baginski describes how, through the small group, she met someone involved in the Young Nationalists. He introduced her to the party organization. Six months later, she became a member.

Baginski’s path follows a pattern familiar to Germany’s domestic intelligence service. Loose groups such as “German Youth Forward,” “Young and Strong,” “Shock Troop” and “Elbe Revolt” recruit teenagers with promises of adventure — hikes to abandoned buildings, martial arts training or “pedo hunting,” in which members track down and threaten suspected pedophiles. Some are closely connected to the Young Nationalists, as party organizations increasingly seek to draw young right-wing extremists into their orbit.

The strategy is working. The Young Nationalists has grown sharply, particularly in eastern Germany. According to the federal government, membership rose from 260 to 400 over the past two years; Baginski puts the figure as high as 500. Many more move in the organization’s orbit without formally joining.

Other groups, too, are mobilizing at a level not seen for many years. Federal and state interior ministries counted almost 500 far-right marches across the country over the past two and a half years. Once dominated by longtime activists taking to the streets for “people” and “the homeland,” today, they are increasingly joined by teenagers seeking action and a sense of community.

“Combat boots, shaved heads and bomber jackets are coming back,” says Max Teske, a 34-year-old teacher at a secondary school in Brandenburg an der Havel, a town west of Berlin. Teske gained national attention in 2023 when he and a colleague wrote an open letter about conditions at their schools. He complained of being confronted daily with far-right symbols, slogans and song titles. School administrators and public authorities, he wrote, had erected a “wall of silence and lack of support.”

His coworkers branded him and his colleague as traitors. Strangers insulted them in the street. The police unit responsible for politically motivated crime advised them to vary their routes home and shop at a different supermarket to shake off potential attackers. Teske became persona non grata in his hometown. Eventually, he moved away.

The case made headlines across Germany because it challenged a long-held conviction: that the country’s schools were a bulwark of democratic resilience.

Since the 1950s, German educators have sought to make democratic education central to schooling. The 1976 Beutelsbach Consensus established principles still influential today: teachers should not indoctrinate students, and controversial issues should be presented as such. The Nazi era also became a central subject across the curriculum, reinforced by visits to concentration-camp memorials and other sites of remembrance.

Today, Teske observes that masculinity, dominance, strength and a certain coldness toward others have increased sharply among young people. “I think the coronavirus pandemic was a major rupture because teachers had less influence over their students and some families were completely overwhelmed.” In isolation, many young Germans turned even more heavily to social media. In many cases, that led to radicalization. The University of Potsdam’s “Youth in Germany” study found that 60% of respondents used social media at levels close to addiction.

At the same time, Teske hears a great deal of anxiety about the future. Some of his students do not know what career to pursue. Others say their parents can barely afford the commute to work because fuel prices are so high. Many have already found culprits for their worries — enemies to blame. Gay people, for example, are considered “abnormal,” Teske says. One student told him he would refuse treatment from a Black doctor. In such discussions, the name of one party comes up again and again: the Alternative for Germany.

For many young people, the path toward the far right begins with a feeling of belonging. “They are looking for a sense of identity,” says Baginski, who now promotes Young Nationalists positions as an influencer. The young woman who once railed against “government orders” has become part of a rigidly hierarchical organization. She attends “ideological training sessions,” lectures by veteran party cadres. “So that you know where you stand politically,” Baginski explains. In livestreams, she also learns how to debate: “Which issues occupy people on the left and how to refute their arguments.”

Baginski rarely seems to stray from her rehearsed script. She smiles frequently as she speaks. Of course she rejects violence, she says. Every people has a right to exist. Just not everywhere. “If I’m interested in Turkish or Arab culture, I can travel to those countries.”

THE STRATEGIST

Daniel Fiss wipes the sweat from his face. It is one of the hottest days of the year: 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Stepping outside feels like walking into a wall of heat. Inside a brewery restaurant, it is pleasantly cool. Fiss is wearing a black T-shirt. He orders a Coke.

The decisive phase of the election campaign has begun in the capital of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The center-left Social Democrats have started to close the gap, but Fiss believes — correctly, it will turn out — that the AfD will emerge as the strongest party and that the project he has pursued for years will succeed.

The 33-year-old wants to show that being “right-wing” no longer has to carry a stigma, even if someone has a radical past. His journey from supporter of a neo-Nazi organization to AfD strategist is an illustration of how the party has brought the radical right out of its niche. And it’s activists like Fiss, who gave the modern right a polished, high-gloss aesthetic, that helped make that happen.

Fiss is from Rostock, one of the most important cities in former East Germany. After reunification, his father worked away from home, including on job sites in western Germany. The family did not experience a social decline. Fiss grew up middle-class, in a neighborhood of detached houses, and describes his relationship with his parents as conflict-ridden but not broken.

As a teenager, he was looking for belonging, a scene and a way to rebel. Most of his classmates were left-wing at the time, Fiss says. “You become active at 16 or 17. At that age, it is the most radical proposition that interests you most,” he says. He already knew individuals from the far-right milieu and joined the Young Nationalists. Asked what makes him right-wing, he points to origin, nation and identity — concepts through which, he says, the right explains the world, just as the left does through class.

Fiss is open about his past and now describes the Young Nationalists as extremist, even a “sect.” He says he grew frustrated with a milieu focused on challenging the system but achieving little politically. Instead, he went looking for a “lever” to reach broader society and popularize views for which he had once been treated as an oddball. His goal, he says, is to break “left-wing hegemony” in media, universities and culture — and for that, the right needs young people.

While studying politics, Fiss joined the Identitarian Movement, which is centered around the Vienna-based far-right activist Martin Sellner. Fiss first became the movement’s regional leader in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and later its deputy chairman.

For Fiss, it was a logical step. While the Identitarian Movement espouses far-right positions, it eschews the overt references to Nazi symbolism sometimes used by other groups, while staging stunts that present far-right extremism as something cinematic and daring. The movement’s supporters have unfurled banners at Berlin’s iconic Brandenburg Gate and marched through the streets of Vienna. In 2017, they chartered a ship and cast themselves as a coast guard to stop refugees in the Mediterranean.

Fiss founded a media agency to offer other far-right politicians his expertise. He won contracts from the AfD, even though the party formally maintains a ban on cooperation with the Identitarians. The commissions brought Fiss into the parliamentary world. He lived in Berlin for four years and, for a time, worked for an AfD member of the German parliament. Later, he returned to Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and joined the party’s group in the state parliament.

“In the past, there were only extremist outlets,” Fiss says. “In retrospect, that was a major dilemma for the political right.” With the AfD, he says, young people now have a party through which they can engage in right-wing politics and challenge the establishment “through democratic means.”

THE DEFECTORS

Despite his broad shoulders, Erik Ahrens looks lanky. He strides into the café near the Sagrada Família, his gaze intense and his handshake firm. Behind him, Emma Mäckel enters the tourist-filled venue in central Barcelona. She is his fiancée. She appears tentative.

He is 32, she is more than a decade younger. He is the eccentric political shape-shifter: first left, then right, and now left again. Permanently online, he has been portrayed by the media as a dangerous agitator. Mäckel, by contrast, keeps a low, almost invisible, profile. What binds them is their far-right past and the story they want to tell about leaving it behind.

Mäckel begins with her account. She came to Germany at the age of 12, she says, having previously lived with her family in Mexico. She moved with her mother into an apartment in the city of Potsdam. The place was not far from Villa Adlon, a neo-Baroque country estate that made headlines in 2024 after it hosted a group of far-right activists — including Sellner, the Austrian activist, and members of the AfD and the Identitarian Movement — who discussed a plan to expel millions of people of foreign origin from Germany.

As a teenager, Mäckel got to know Mathilda Huss, a businesswoman whose husband had purchased the property in 2011. A biologist and philosopher, Huss is a proponent of the idea that a “biological hierarchy” exists among human beings. “She was a little mysterious and a role model for me,” Mäckel says. “She discussed things with me, feminism for example.”

Mäckel describes herself at that time as “very left-wing.” At school, she organized a group for queer teenagers and attended Fridays for Future climate protests. Huss, she says, presented her with a different understanding of feminism: Women today were being forced to work. Those who chose to become a housewife and mother faced discrimination. Women were being oppressed not by patriarchy, but by a supposedly emancipatory system that denies them traditional roles. “At some point, I adopted those ideas,” Mäckel says. “And over time, more and more of her system of thought.”

Through Huss, Mäckel met young men and women from far-right circles, including Ahrens. Many in the group were in the Identitarian Movement’s orbit; others had ties to the AfD. According to Mäckel, Huss “bankrolled” the young right-wing radicals. (In response to questions for this article, Huss disputes Mäckel’s account. “I didn’t bankroll anyone,” she says.)

One of the young men, an Identitarian, became Mäckel’s boyfriend. She dropped out of school and moved to Vienna with him. “Entering the right-wing scene changed every aspect of my life,” she says. She became a kind of “tradwife,” submitting to her partner sexually and cooking for him three times a day — “only organic meat,” she recalls. But the couple soon ran out of money. “At times, I had to go out and steal,” Mäckel says. Then came violence. The relationship fell apart. In 2024, Mäckel returned to Potsdam.

There, she grew closer to Ahrens. He was turning 30 and was busier than almost anyone else around Huss. He had founded four companies in three countries and worked for the AfD. Together with extremists from several countries, he planned to build a propaganda network to spread racial ideology. The idea was to create a kind of sect that lonely young men would join. Ahrens wanted to make money from it. In a romantic moment — more serious than joking — he told Mäckel he wanted to make her his “Reich Women’s Leader.”

Secretly, however, both were already wrestling with doubts about the far right, not least because of the gulf between what its members claimed to be accomplishing and what they were really doing. “Many of these people pretended to be filmmakers or photographers or authors,” Mäckel says. Ahrens adds: “I always worked 24/7, while most of them never managed to get anything done.”

Before Ahrens joined the far right, he was a student teacher active in left-wing university groups — but he alienated many of his comrades with his penchant for provocation and conflict. He attributes his political switch less to conviction than ambition. Ahrens calls it a “get-rich-quick scheme.” According to his account, he began spreading far-right views through an anonymous Twitter account. A few months later, he says, he was sitting down with Huss, Sellner and multimillionaire businesspeople.

In this milieu, Ahrens entrepreneurialism quickly paid off. He understood how to package content for the internet. He founded a “Counter-University,” a training platform offering far-right and völkisch content. Sellner appeared as a lecturer. Ahrens claims it was in one of the Austrian activist’s talks that he first heard the term “remigration.”

“I told him: That’s a great word,” he recalls. The term sounds academic, but is a “dog whistle,” he adds. “Strategically, it was brilliant.” The AfD adopted the term in its manifesto for the 2025 federal election.

Today, Ahrens says of Sellner: “He is a better propagandist than Hitler was.” It is a typical Ahrens sentence: a provocation. He immediately adds an explanation: “In 2026, Hitler would be no more than an insignificant figure in the right-wing scene. The Nazis had a good instinct for images. But today, reaching the masses is much harder than it used to be. There is so much more competition.”

The trick, he adds, is to find a way to stand out amid the thicket of political messages. That’s what he did with the AfD’s Krah, now a member of parliament, who Aherns describes as “one of my horses in the race.”

“I saw huge potential in him because he had that showmanship,” Ahrens says. With his silk scarf and aviator glasses, Krah “didn’t quite fit the mold — he was like a Russian oligarch.” Ahrens helped Krah make short videos targeting a young audience. “I knew he was ready to conquer TikTok. He had that pasha aura. That’s why I put Oriental music under his videos.”

Krah, who did not respond to a request for comment for this article, became an online icon — more meme than politician. But the following he built on social media was real. By the time Krah had become his party’s lead candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, Ahrens was planning to propel him into the chancellery.

Instead, the two men fell out. By March 2025, Ahrens was insulting his former ally on X as a “corrupt fat maggot” and accusing him of being paid by Russia. A short time later, Ahrens publicly announced his break with the AfD.

Asked why, Ahrens offers several explanations. He says he read the philosophers Hegel, Adorno and Marx. He also looked into Scientology and recognized parallels with the Identitarian Movement. Books by people who had left the sect helped him, he says.

And then there was love. He and Mäckel had pulled each other out of the movement and begun working on themselves. “Erik and I both had mental health problems,” Mäckel says. “That led us to the right.”

Today, far-right ideology has lost its appeal for the couple. What once promised them stability and influence now seems as hopeless as the country they left. They no longer want to live in Germany. The country is “politically lost,” Mäckel says. Perhaps they will go to Mexico, Ahrens adds.

Lilly Baginski, by contrast, is planning her future in Germany. She wants to continue spreading the ideology of the Young Nationalists and have three children, preferably in her adopted home in eastern Germany. “It is more attractive to me here than Ludwigshafen, where nobody speaks German,” she says.

Daniel Fiss, too, has a clear goal: the state chancellery in Schwerin, the regional capital of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. While AfD has won the September election in the state, it did not get enough votes to govern on its own, and the other political parties are refusing to govern with it.

And yet, across Germany, the so-called political “firewall” erected by the establishment to keep out the far right is under strain. Many believe it’s only a matter of time before it crumbles and the AfD can strike governing alliances like any conventional party.

For Fiss, the project is just beginning.

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