The German federal government's Sustainable Development Strategy 2025 (DNS 2025), published in English on bundesregierung.de under the title "Shaping transformation fairly together," explicitly addresses "racist and far-right hostility and attacks" and calls for strengthening initiatives run by and for those affected bundesregierung.de. The document, dated May 13, 2025, embeds anti-extremism language directly into a policy instrument normally reserved for climate, biodiversity and fiscal-sustainability targets.

That framing did not emerge in a vacuum. It follows eighteen months in which the Alternative for Germany (AfD) moved from a protest movement polling in the single digits to the second-largest force in the Bundestag. In September 2024, the AfD became the first far-right party to win a state election in postwar Germany, taking Thuringia AP News. Weeks earlier, in the June 2024 European Parliament election, Germany's governing coalition parties posted feeble results while the AfD gained ground AP News. By February 2025, the AfD had doubled its federal-election vote share to 20.8%, a historic second-place finish AP News.

The DNS 2025's language on far-right hostility reads as an institutional response to that trajectory, translating a political anxiety that had been aired in speeches into the vocabulary of a strategy document that outlives any single chancellery. Then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz had invoked Germany's Nazi past in January 2024 while urging citizens to reject the AfD Reuters, and by January 2025 was calling Elon Musk's public support for the party "completely unacceptable" AP News. Days later, Scholz publicly rebuked US Vice President JD Vance over Europe's approach to hate speech and the far right Reuters, a rare instance of a German leader contesting a senior American official's framing of domestic German politics.

The coalition that Scholz led collapsed before any of this settled. He fired his finance minister, ending the governing coalition, and subsequently laid out a timeline toward early elections DW. That collapse produced the February 2025 vote in which Friedrich Merz's conservatives won what Reuters characterized as a lackluster victory amid a gloomy national mood Reuters, followed by what AP described as complex coalition negotiations AP News. Weeks before that vote, Merz's own conservatives had won parliamentary approval for a migration restriction proposal with AfD votes — the first time since the war that a mainstream party had relied on far-right support to pass legislation in the Bundestag, a move Reuters flagged as a taboo-breaking risk for the election frontrunner Reuters.

Merz is now chancellor. The New York Times reported on July 2, 2026, that he had reached an agreement with his center-left coalition partners on politically painful economic and pension compromises explicitly framed as an effort to hold off the far right New York Times. The DNS 2025's anti-extremism provisions, drafted under the outgoing government but published under the incoming one's watch, sit alongside that overhaul as parallel instruments aimed at the same underlying constituency: voters drifting toward the AfD over migration, economic stagnation and a sense of institutional drift.

What stands out is the shift in register. Scholz's 2023 optimism that AfD support would "shrink again before the next election" Fox40/AP gave way within a year to alarm at the party's electoral gains, voiced on DW News after the June 2024 European vote DW News. The SPD did fend off the AfD in Brandenburg's state election that September Reuters, a rare bright spot, but the broader curve bent the other way. A sustainable-development strategy naming far-right hostility as a policy target is, in that sense, less a fresh initiative than a bureaucratic codification of a trend the political class had already spent two years reacting to in real time.

Whether embedding this language in a long-horizon strategy document changes behavior on the ground is a separate question from whether it changes the political conversation. Strategy documents of this kind typically inform funding streams for civil-society programs, federal reporting obligations and inter-ministerial coordination rather than criminal law or electoral rules. Their leverage is administrative, not legislative. Merz's pension and economic compromises, by contrast, aim directly at the material grievances — cost of living, retirement security — that polling has consistently linked to AfD support. The two tracks, one symbolic-administrative, one fiscal-legislative, now run under a chancellor whose own party helped normalize AfD-backed votes in parliament less than eighteen months ago. That tension between managing the far right's rhetorical space and negotiating with it tactically on discrete legislation is likely to remain the defining friction of Merz's tenure.