AfD Eases Off Its Anti-Euro Crusade as the Far Right Gains Ground Across Europe

The Alternative for Germany is rethinking the very cause that gave it life. Founded in 2013 in fury over euro-zone bailouts, the party is now talking about reshaping the bloc from within rather than ditching the single currency, according to Reuters. The shift comes after a historic win in September's Saxony-Anhalt regional vote and a run of nationwide polls that put the AfD on top.

In October, co-leader Alice Weidel unveiled a strategy paper billed as a New Deal For Europe, presented in Strasbourg alongside allies from the Europe of Sovereign Nations grouping. The document drops the old focus on euro-zone and EU exit, pitching instead a looser union built through renegotiated treaties. It floats an opt-out mechanism for members that reject shared policies on defence spending or immigration, demands stricter enforcement of budget rules, and leaves the door open to keeping the euro. If reform fails, the paper says, Germans would settle their European future by referendum. Weidel described the goal as a Europe of fatherlands, but wouldn't say whether she still backs leaving the euro or the EU.

That ambiguity is the whole fight. AfD lawmaker Sebastian Muenzenmaier argued the odds for reshaping the EU have never looked better. But Jean-Pascal Hohm, the 29-year-old who heads the party's youth wing Generation Deutschland, warns that hardline positions could wreck the AfD's most plausible route to federal power: eventually partnering with Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Christian Democratic Union, which currently refuses any alliance. Hohm called scrapping the common currency utopian and said it would do Germany massive damage. A resolution he submitted at an August congress, affirming the European idea, was withdrawn after it failed to win enough support. The euro issue, he admitted, proved more controversial than expected.

The AfD would hardly be the first to soften. France's National Rally spent years campaigning to abandon the euro before dropping the demand under Marine Le Pen, and is now the favourite for the 2027 presidential race. Italy's Brothers of Italy has dialled back its eurosceptic rhetoric since Giorgia Meloni took office, and Austria's Freedom Party, a close AfD ally, shed most of its anti-European positions on its way into national government.

Kassel University political scientist Wolfgang Schroeder called Austria a blueprint for the AfD, adding it's probably only a matter of time before the party drops those positions, and he doesn't expect much resistance when it does. He also pointed out that Germany's export-driven economy is so tangled with global markets that leaving the EU or the euro would be a disaster, making self-sufficiency of the kind Hitler pursued in 1933 practically impossible without risking collapse.