Emergence: The AfD and the European Debt Crisis in the 2013 Federal Election

Founded just seven months before the 2013 German federal election, the AfD’s result of 4.7% in September of that year represented both a glass half-full and a glass half-empty. While it neither cleared the 5% hurdle of the 2nd (PR) vote nor won a single constituency outright (either one necessary for representation in the Bundestag)—thus failing in its attempt to become Germany’s sixth major national political party—the AfD’s surprisingly good result in the 2013 federal election demonstrated the power of issue entrepreneurship. Utilizing the 2013 pre- and post-election German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), we demonstrate empirically how in both its campaign and party program the AfD capitalized on the German public’s dissatisfaction with EU bailouts of member states (in particular, Greece) to win a significant number of votes.