The AfD’s retreat on exiting the euro shows how it’s eyeing power

 

The AfD’s retreat on exiting the euro shows how it’s eyeing power

 

Germany’s far-right party may drop one of its founding tenets to broaden its electoral appeal.

Alice Weidel addresses delegates at the Alternative for Germany party congress in Erfurt on July 4, 2026. | John MacDougall/AFP via Getty Images

October 8, 2026 1:59 pm CET

By Johanna Treeck

https://www.politico.eu/article/alternative-for-germany-afd-exit-euro-power/

 

A move by the far-right Alternative for Germany to soften its pledge to quit the euro is the latest sign that the party is adapting itself to an ambition that once seemed remote: governing Germany.

The shift, proposed in a strategy paper by the German right-wing party seen by POLITICO, turns a long-standing, unequivocal commitment to abandoning the euro into something more acceptable to average Germans. It's the kind of pragmatic move radical parties across Europe have made as a rising tide of support has brought them closer to real power.

In the paper, first reported by Bild am Sonntag, the AfD drops its demand for Germany to withdraw in an “orderly” manner from the EU’s flagship monetary integration project. Instead, it proposes putting the issue to a national referendum if its partners refuse to implement a series of radical reforms to the way the currency union operates.

“The AfD is now trying to sand down its most controversial edges,” said ING’s global head of macro research, Carsten Brzeski. “It probably wants to look more fit for government ... It is repackaging the exit debate within a more nuanced, euroskeptic platform.”

Others were more blunt.

“This will make them sound less mad,” said EFG Bank chief economist Stefan Gerlach.

Delegates raise their voting cards during an AfD convention in Magdeburg, Germany on July 11, 2026. | Jens Schülter/AFP via Getty Images

The proposal is not yet official policy: The AfD’s current platform, as expressed in its manifesto at last year’s federal elections, still calls for leaving the euro, and a party convention is expected to consider any changes only next year. René Aust, president of the Europe of Sovereign Nations group in the European Parliament, of which the AfD is part, argued in a social media post that the shift merely elaborates an existing position.

However, its symbolism is important, as it would mark a clear departure from its founding ​principles. The AfD began life as an anti-euro party, energized by the controversial ad hoc bailouts of governments including Greece, Ireland and Portugal during the sovereign debt crisis between 2010 and 2012. But after founder Bernd Lucke was pushed out in 2015, immigration and other hot-button issues of the culture war took center stage and euroskepticism receded into the background.

The new shift also appears to represent a victory for AfD leader Alice Weidel, who has eyes on the federal chancellery. She has argued for the last couple of years that it is “much too late” for Germany to extract itself from the euro and, in a keynote interview with state broadcaster ZDF in August, she deflected questions about the manifesto commitment to leave, preferring to rail against the currency’s shortcomings and perceived abuses in its governance at Germany’s expense.

Marcel Lewandowsky, professor of politics at the University of Halle and an expert on populism, said he sees the shift as part of a broader trend among Europe’s far right in moderating its language and aspirations the closer it gets to power.

After two emphatic victories in regional elections last month, and with a clear and growing lead in national polls, the AfD has never been so close to power. Lewandowsky noted that France’s National Rally (RN) had also dropped pledges to ditch the euro and leave the EU. Those decisions appear to have cemented the party’s lead in national polls, giving Marine Le Pen her best chance yet of securing the French presidency in elections next spring.

Still crazy after all these years?

It’s not that the AfD has abandoned radicalism or suddenly developed a love for the single currency. It wants countries that receive indirect financial support through the European Central Bank’s lending and bond-buying operations to settle their liabilities in the central bank’s payments system (known as TARGET) regularly, either in gold or Bitcoin.

And it wants to succeed where Angela Merkel’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble failed, in enforcing a bankruptcy mechanism for eurozone sovereigns. For good measure, it also demands giving Germany more influence in the ECB’s decision-making process, arguing that voting rights on the Governing Council should be tied to the size and economic weight of the member countries.

Beyond that, the strategy paper also floats dissolving the European Parliament and replacing MEPs with country delegations so that national parliaments “remain accountable to the citizens of each nation, rather than developing an internal logic detached from them.” Lewandowsky called this “a move away from supranationalism towards international cooperation at the European level, with rules to govern it.”

“This would require an agreement by all member states, which you won’t get,” EFG’s Gerlach said.  

With Germany’s partners likely to resist calls for such changes to the EU treaties, any future federal government led by the AfD could easily find itself in a situation where it could consider the conditions for a referendum as given.

Brexit echoes

But Germans don’t seem in any hurry for a referendum: 87% support the euro, according to the European Commission’s Eurobarometer survey this spring.

“For populist, far-right parties the call for referendums matter more than actually holding one,” Lewandowsky said. “As long as they keep demanding a referendum, they can say, ‘the real people, whom only we represent, aren’t being consulted.’ That is the point.”

Germans don’t seem in any hurry for a referendum: 87% support the euro, according to the European Commission’s Eurobarometer survey this spring. | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images

For Berenberg chief economist Holger Schmieding, the strategy resembles that of former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, by suggesting reforms that other countries are unlikely to accept and then letting voters decide what happens if the negotiations fail.

Cameron’s fate is a reminder that the strategy is not without risk. And with increasing calls for ECB support from French politicians of both left and right, those risks may be about to flare up again.

But however that pans out, the nuclear option of blowing up the euro seems off the cards, analysts say.

“A German exit from the euro — or even a credible threat to leave — would be an enormous act of economic self-sabotage,” said Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). “An exit would reduce investment, cost millions of jobs, destroy prosperity and trigger a deep financial crisis in Europe.”

It’s a point that other prominent AfD leaders besides Weidel are now grudgingly accepting. Lawmaker Bernd Baumann wryly observed at a press conference Tuesday, the moment for ‘Dexit,’ Germany's exit from the euro had passed, if it ever even existed.

“The longer the marriage,” he said, “the more expensive the divorce.”