Germany's new federal government has embedded language on combating far-right extremism directly into its Sustainable Development Strategy 2025 (DNS 2025), published in May. The move places anti-extremism alongside traditional policy targets like climate and fiscal health, signaling how thoroughly the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has reshaped the political agenda.

That shift reflects eighteen months of electoral upheaval. The AfD moved from a fringe protest movement to the second-largest party in the Bundestag. In September 2024, it became the first far-right party since World War II to win a state election, capturing Thuringia. The June 2024 European Parliament election showed the same pattern: the governing coalition stumbled while the AfD gained ground. By February 2025, the party had nearly doubled its federal vote share to 20.8%, securing a historic second-place finish.

The DNS 2025's anti-extremism language reads as an institutional effort to codify what political leaders had been saying in speeches for months. Then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz invoked Nazi-era history in January 2024 to urge voters to reject the AfD, and by January 2025 was calling Elon Musk's public support for the party "completely unacceptable." Days later, Scholz publicly rebuked US Vice President JD Vance over how Europe approaches hate speech and the far right—a rare moment of a German leader contesting a senior American official's framing of German politics.

The political ground shifted before any of this language settled into policy. Scholz's coalition collapsed when he fired his finance minister, leading to early elections in February 2025. Friedrich Merz's conservatives won what observers described as a lackluster victory amid public anxiety, followed by complex coalition negotiations. Weeks before that vote, Merz's own party had passed a migration restriction with AfD support—the first time since the postwar era that a mainstream party had relied on far-right votes to pass Bundestag legislation, a taboo-breaking moment that risked damaging the election frontrunner.

Merz is now chancellor. In July 2026, he announced an agreement with his center-left coalition partners on economically difficult pension and spending compromises, explicitly framed as an effort to retain voters drifting toward the AfD over migration, economic stagnation, and institutional weakness. The DNS 2025's anti-extremism provisions, drafted under the previous government but published under Merz's watch, sit alongside that fiscal overhaul as parallel efforts aimed at the same voter anxiety.

What stands out is how quickly the tone changed. Scholz's 2023 confidence that AfD support would "shrink again before the next election" shifted within a year to alarm. The SPD managed a rare win in Brandenburg's state election that September, but the overall trajectory moved the opposite direction. A sustainable-development strategy naming far-right hostility as a policy target is less a novel initiative than a bureaucratic recording of a trend the political class had been reacting to in real time for two years.

Here's where the two approaches diverge. Strategy documents like the DNS 2025 typically direct funding to civil-society programs, set federal reporting standards, and coordinate between ministries—administrative tools, not legislative ones. Merz's pension and economic compromises, by contrast, aim directly at material grievances like cost of living and retirement security, which polling links to AfD support. One track is symbolic and organizational; the other is fiscal and legislative. Both now operate under a chancellor whose party normalized AfD-backed votes in parliament less than eighteen months ago. That tension between managing the far right's rhetoric and negotiating with it tactically on individual legislation will likely define Merz's tenure.