The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), now the biggest opposition party in the Bundestag, is steadily gaining support, with some polls suggesting that the AfD has pulled ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and its allied Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU). In September's municipal elections across North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most-populous state, the AfD tripled its share of the vote from 2020.
With a roaring noise, the yellow excavator razes the last remains of another derelict property in the Bismarck district of Gelsenkirchen to the ground. An entire street with seven houses is being flattened to make way for new houses and a kindergarten. The dilapidated properties and piles of rubbish in the street were not only a huge nuisance for local residents, but also a big campaign issue for the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD)which linked it to labor migration from Southeast Europe.
Since 2017, German political parties have had to pay a cumulative 1.8 million ($2.1 million) in administrative penalties with over half issued to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). The fines pertain to issues such as illegal donations, the misuse of parliamentary group funds and the provision of false information in financial reports. And according to official figures reported in this weekend's Welt am Sonntag broadsheet and seen by the Germany dpa news agency, the AfD alone has been fined around 1.1 million.
During the television interview with ARD on Sunday, Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, appeared at times to struggle to hear the questions being asked of her as protesters gathered below the provisional stage for the interview in Berlin. The speakers of a bus used as part of the demonstration blared the anti-AfD song Schei AfD Jodler, which hindered the interview's audio quality significantly for viewers at home.
