Far-Right Failure: Parties of the Far Right in Germany, 1945–2023

The Federal Republic of Germany is no stranger to far-right parties, but none has enjoyed lasting electoral success. The AfD has already broken the pattern of its predecessors. In this chapter, we explore the history of far-right parties in Germany to contextualize the AfD’s unprecedented success.  Our argument here is that the ultimate failure of these far-right parties can be traced to a variety of endogenous and exogenous factors—factors we probe further in our examination of the AfD in later chapters. Chief among these factors, we will argue, is the AfD's skillful use of a strategy of issue entrepreneurship.