The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party celebrated a record election result Sunday that fuelled its wildest hopes of one day entering government.
The anti-immigration party scored about 20 percent according to early projections, second only to the conservatives of Friedrich Merz.
"We have achieved a historic result," the AfD's top candidate Alice Weidel, 46, told supporters cheering and waving the German national flag at an election night party in Berlin.
For many German citizens and the mainstream parties, it was an anticipated but still shocking result, spelling the death knell for the notion that the country still seeking to atone for the Holocaust was immune to a far right-wing surge.
Attempts to whitewash Germany's Nazi and Holocaust history have prompted state security services to put the party under observation and made it the target of mass street protests.
But Weidel insisted that the party was now "firmly anchored" in the political landscape and had "never been so strong on a national level".
She again made overtures Sunday to the CDU/CSU to work together in government, an idea that Merz has vehemently rejected.
Many Germans are deeply worried by the rise of the party that has openly railed against irregular migrants, Islam, and multiculturalism.
In the social-media-fuelled culture wars increasingly splitting Western liberal democracies, the AfD voices anti-"woke" views, doubts climate change and leans toward Moscow on the Ukraine war.
Russian-linked disinformation campaigns have heavily supported pro-AfD views and narratives.
The AfD sometimes insists it is "conservative-libertarian", and the ideological kin of US President Donald Trump, whose cabinet members and billionaire ally Elon Musk have voiced full-throated support for it.
Weidel predicted that if Merz's CDU/CSU continued to refuse to work with her party to "implement the will of the people", the AfD would "overtake" them in the next election.
'Alice for Germany'
Around 200 people gathered to watch exit polls come in at the AfD's local headquarters in Berlin's Pankow district, which was festooned with balloons in the party's signature blue colour.
Cheers and chants of "A-F-D!" went up when the result was announced.
"People are fed up with the politics of the old parties, the prices are going up all the time," said 63-year-old pensioner Karin Kuschy, who has been voting for the party since 2017.
"And we have lots of attacks, people are scared."
The AfD has seized on a string of deadly stabbing and car-ramming attacks blamed on asylum seekers to push its demands for more restrictions on immigration.
Arne Maier, a 33-year-old civil servant, said he also supported the Moscow-friendly party's "foreign policy views" and "pro-freedom values".
Under Weidel, the AfD has sought to play down some of its harshest nativist and revisionist rhetoric.
During the campaign, she was at pains to nudge the AfD further into the mainstream, helped by getting air time in TV debates with the other top candidates.
Nevertheless, the party's choice of "Alice for Germany" as a slogan was seen by some as a dog-whistle to right-wing extremists, given how similar it sounds to the banned Nazi slogan "Alles fuer Deutschland" (Everything for Germany).
Bjoern Hoecke, the party's leader in the state of Thuringia, has been fined twice for using those words. On Sunday night, he was grinning broadly at Weidel's side.
In vast areas of ex-communist Eastern Germany, the AfD's heartland, the AfD scored above 30 percent.
But in western areas too, a growing number of voters feel the AfD's hardest edges have been softened, in part by Weidel's personal story, which defies some of the party's ultra-conservative "family values" platform.
Weidel lives with a female Sri Lanka-born partner -- with whom she is raising two children, in a town across the border in Switzerland -- and is a Mandarin speaker who during a business career spent several years in China.
Femke COLBORNE / AFP
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