One in five voters in the German election favored the far right. The AfD leader’s dramatic rise terrifies many of the others.

The half-naked protester was filmed defacing remnants of the Berlin Wall kept outside the German embassy in Ukraine capital Kyiv on Sunday with a Hitler mustache and swept-over cropped dark hair

The leading candidate, Friedrich Merz, a conservative who has adopted many of the AfD’s hard-line positions on immigration, used his closing statement of the debate to promise his voters that he would never allow the AfD into his government. Under him, he said, the firewall would hold.

Germany’s federal elections took place this weekend, with the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) winning overall and set to form a coalition government.

Germany’s political system is set up to exclude extremists. Yet the country is waking up to a new political reality that has lurched to the right with the once outcast Alternative for Germany (AfD) party now firmly established in German politics.

Germany’s right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland party, or AfD, is on course for a stunning result in Sunday’s German election, with reports indicating one-in-five voters

German far-right AfD leader Alice Weidel pledges to overtake conservative bloc, vows to win first place in next election.

The far-right had its strongest showing since World War II, while the center-left Social Democrats had their worst postwar result.

German opposition leader Friedrich Merz’s conservatives have won a lackluster victory in a national election Sunday, projections show.

The Christian Democrats won with 28.6% of the vote while the far-right Alternative for Germany came second with 20.8%.