Is There a Shift to the Right among Young People in Germany?

This article reassesses claims of a rightward shift among young people in Germany by conceptualising such a shift as a longitudinal transformation across political behaviour, attitudes, and public discourse. Drawing on representative electoral statistics and recurring survey data, it analyses developments over the past two decades. While the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has achieved substantial electoral gains among young voters, these do not amount to a coherent rightward realignment. At the federal level, rising AfD support coincides with stable or increasing support for centre-left parties, while state-level patterns are more heterogeneous and sometimes show the AfD catching up with or overtaking the centre-left bloc. Developments in right-wing crime and organisation point to consolidation rather than a broader shift, with parts of the young far-right potential clustering in the AfD’s organisational environment. At the attitudinal level, young people’s self-placement has remained stable or shifted slightly leftward, and agreement with right-wing extremist positions has generally declined. Evidence on public discourse is limited and does not indicate a systematic expansion of right-wing boundaries of sayability. The findings therefore point to party normalisation without ideological normalisation: the AfD functions as a normalised political actor mobilising pre-existing, partly declining right-wing attitudinal potentials among young people.