Head of right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) Frauke Petry attends a press conference in Berlin | John MacDougall/AFP via Getty Images Forum Germany’s far-right AfD is here to stay Political commentators call it hopelessly outdated. But that doesn’t mean there’s no political future in looking backwards.

A few weeks ago when Frauke Petry, chairwoman of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), stumbled in a television interview with former BBC correspondent Tim Sebastian, the video went viral in Germany. There are more than enough people who want to see the ascendant right-wing party fail, and they are looking for any sign of decline. They’re citing inner-party conflicts and a lack of leadership. They are also saying that the AfD has no clear-cut political profile beyond its anti-immigration stance.

All of which is true. And yet, the truth is that the AfD is not going away anytime soon. Over the past couple of years, the party has gained representation in eight of the nation’s 16 state parliaments. Double figures in the 2017 federal elections seem likely, opinion polls show. Germany is no longer immune to the kind of right-wing populism that its European neighbors have long grown accustomed to. The question to ask is not whether the AfD is likely to stay, but what the party’s rise means for German politics.

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The AfD isn’t post-war Germany’s first right-wing party. Time and again, nationalist hardliners have tried to entrench themselves in German politics. For the most part, they failed. The extremist parties NPD and DVU, founded in the 1960s and 1970s respectively, managed to pass the 5 percent hurdle in a couple of regional elections. But they never got a foothold on the federal level. The more moderate Republikaner, or Republicans, run by a former Waffen-SS man named Franz Schönhuber, faded away in the 1990s.

Some of Germany’s right-wing parties self-destructed because their appeal was mostly regional. Others proved to be incompetent and badly managed once they reached a certain size. But the most important reason they didn’t succeed was that the vast majority of Germans wouldn’t have voted for anyone or anything they remotely associated with Nazi politics. The taboo was that strong.

The AfD launched in 2013. Its founders were mostly academics — economic liberals, not right-wingers — who opposed the eurozone bailout policies.

Not anymore. Over the past decade or so, the German focus on the Nazi past as a defining trait of national identity has grown weaker. Eighty-one percent of Germans say they want to put the persecution of Jews behind them, according to a recent survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation. Expressions of patriotism have become socially acceptable again — and the AfD has cleverly tapped into that. Only a few years ago, their argument that mass migration threatens German identity and culture would have sounded scandalously nationalist. To many Germans it still does, but by no means to all.

The AfD launched in 2013. Its founders were mostly academics — economic liberals, not right-wingers — who opposed the eurozone bailout policies. But the type of conservative German who believes that the euro is all about Greeks having a laugh at Germany’s expense tends to be suspicious of immigrants from the Middle East, too. So when the numbers of refugees started to swell, the anti-euro party successfully reinvented itself as an anti-immigration party.

Today, the AfD is still a strange hybrid. Although some of the liberals have left — most notably Bernd Lucke, a Hamburg economist and a co-founder of the AfD — there’s still enough bourgeois respectability around to make the party attractive to mainstream conservatives.

The AfD brings together the likes of co-chair Jörg Meuthen, an economics professor who makes all the right noises (“We are patriots, not nationalists”), with Björn Höcke, chairman of the Thuringia branch, who doesn’t. A racist statement about the “reproductive habits” of Africans earned Höcke an opinion piece titled “The New Face of German Hate” in The New York Times.

The AfD’s opponents have predicted that inner-party conflicts will soon tear the party apart. But they are missing the point. The very fact that Germany’s Meuthens have agreed to work together with the Höckes shows just how much the political culture has changed. Besides, tensions between moderates and hardliners are hardly unique to the AfD. Role models such as Switzerland’s Swiss People’s Party or Austria’s Freedom Party have not been weakened by long-running ideological battles. (On the contrary, the good cop/bad cop routine seems to work for right-wing parties, too.)

What’s more, the AfD will continue to benefit from the metamorphosis of Angela Merkel’s conservative, mainstream CDU party. Until recently, Chancellor Merkel was considered a rather boring sort of politician, skillful and efficient, but lacking in vision and ambition. But ever since she opened the German borders for refugees last fall, her image changed entirely. She’s now seen as a resolute leader who single-handedly modernized the CDU and moved it to the political center. Merkel, who runs a grand coalition with the Social Democrats has introduced a minimum wage and abolished compulsory military service. After the Fukushima disaster she also decided to phase out nuclear power. In doing all this, she alienated the CDU’s conservative base and created a huge void on the political right that the AfD is more than happy to fill.

On April 30 — the centenary of Adolf Hitler’s suicide, incidentally — the AfD will introduce its party program to the public. A plan to ban muezzin calls and minarets will likely attract the most attention. Just this week, AfD leaders caused a stir, suggesting that Islam isn’t compatible with German law. But there’s more to the AfD than its suspicion of Islam. A draft leaked last month reads like a best-of-right-wing-populism, with bits and pieces coming from the pages of other European parties (and from the U.S. Republicans, too). The AfD espouses conservative family values and traditional gender roles. It is pro-life and skeptical about climate change. It also calls for a flat tax of 25 percent and for a reversal of Merkel’s exit from nuclear energy. Much like its counterparts elsewhere, the party appeals to conservative voters who feel threatened by the usual suspects of globalization, liberalization and multiculturalism.

So what’s next? Much depends on the AfD’s position towards right-wing extremism.

Political commentators who studied the draft were quick to draw parallels to the CDU politics of the pre-Merkel era of the 1960s and 70s, calling it hopelessly outdated. But that doesn’t mean there’s no political future in looking backwards. Other right-wing populist parties in Europe (or the U.S.’s Donald Trump, for that matter, who wants to make “America great again”) have attracted voters by suggesting that it’s possible to turn back the clocks. If tendencies elsewhere are anything to go by, then a German right-wing populist party could eventually end up with up to 30 percent of the national vote.

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So what’s next? Much depends on the AfD’s position towards right-wing extremism. Last year alone, there were more than 1,000 attacks on refugee homes in Germany. Incidents of right-wing violence have risen sharply. Doomsayers say that the AfD has already been infiltrated by networks of extremists and that it’s going to become ever more xenophobic and radical. But that need not happen. So far, the AfD is no more extreme than other parties of its kind. And in the best case scenario, the populists’ rise in the political system would have a mitigating effect on the country’s angry 30 percent. In a recent interview with Der Spiegel, AfD leader Petry said that what Germany needs is “a healthy kind of patriotism.” The burden of proof is on her and her party.

Konstantin Richter, a German novelist and journalist, is a contributing writer at POLITICO. He is the author of “Bettermann” and “Kafka was Young and He Needed the Money.”