This book traces the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) from its inception in 2013 to its re-election to the Bundestag in 2021, emphasising the party s nature as a populist issue entrepreneur and covering the three major crises that have shaken European party politics the Eurozone crisis, the so-called refugee crisis and the COVID pandemic. Currently, books on the AfD are largely limited to historical accounts and surface-level analyses of the party. This volume is both empirically rigorous and conceptually nuanced: it seeks to understand the party s political trajectory and its appeal to its supporters by using advanced quantitative methodologies to analyse voter behaviour, as well as by interpreting the party s communication strategies through mixed empirical methods. It embeds this account within a well-grounded theoretical argument. The argument emphasises three important explanatory conditions a favourable political opportunity structure, issue entrepreneurship, and the party s stages of political development.
