EuropeAnalysis

The guru showing Alternative for Germany how to use social media to win votes and influence young people

The far-right party’s success in recent German state elections was partly down to its social media strategy

Supporters of the far-right Alternative for Germany political party gather in Erfurt before last Sunday's Thuringia state elections. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Derek Scally's picture
Derek Scally in Berlin
Tue Sept 03 2024 - 15:32

Critics of Erik Ahrens accuse him of a lot, but they can’t accuse him of subterfuge.

The 30-year-old social media guru for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is more than happy to explain how he helped the far-right party take 38 per cent of 18-24-year-olds’ votes in Sunday’s election in Thuringia – more than five points above the statewide result.

Above all Ahrens is proud of helping to smash the assumption – in eastern Germany at least – that young people are more left-wing than their parents.

Not one for modesty, Ahrens sees himself on a level with Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings, telling Der Spiegel magazine last June: “I am extremely productive, I am extremely motivated, I am extremely clever, and I am right-wing.”

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Ahrens’s main achievement in the last two years has been to supercharge AfD visibility among young voters with fast, edgy and emotional TikTok content that mainstream parties are now trying to imitate.

The AfD party's social media influencer, Erik Ahrens. Photograph: X

“But their content is boring ... only right-wing content goes viral,” said Ahrens to followers in a recent TikTok workshop, passing on tips for optimising content – music, edits, emotional appeal – for maximum success on the Chinese-owned platform.

With his interest in hard patriotic nationalism and identity politics, Ahrens makes no secret of his medium-term goals for winning over others.

His political manifesto, pinned on his X profile, envisions a 13-year-old on TikTok who follows right-wing hiking, martial arts or fitness influencers; aged 15 he joins similar groups in real life while “the algorithm gradually brings him into our gravitational field”.

By 18 this ideal Ahrens follower is consuming “core content: blood and will, innate destiny, German worldview, genuine view of history. All or nothing”.

Eventually this Ahrens follower “goes to university, to the student union, to training, to work, into marriage, war, life”.

Ambitious goals but, for Ahrens, not impossible given the revelatory moment he discovered TikTok and its hypnotic effect of short, repeated clips.

“Like people felt in 1923 when the radio was invented – that’s how I feel when I watch my TikToks,” he told a recent audience of the Institute for State Politics (IFS), a think tank specialising in right-wing nationalistic thinking.

While the IFS targets older right-wing Germans who read, Ahrens has helped AfD reach the 55 per cent of TikTok users aged between 14 and 19 who spend, on average, 90 minutes a day on the app.

“That means we have 90 minutes daily in which we can beam into their brains,” he said.

Capturing what Ahrens calls the “valuable social capital of attention” is not a new concern.

Academic Neil Postman flagged a similar battle in his 1986 non-fiction book Amusing Ourselves to Death, about the decline in US public discourse in the era of cable television.

Citing Aldous Huxley, author of dystopian novel Brave New World, Postman warned: “The civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions’.”

For German digital consultant Martin Fuchs, this appetite for distraction – and a human susceptibility to provocation – is driving the AfD’s social media success, where “virality leads to higher visibility.

Last weekend’s election result in Thuringia, where the Social Democratic Party (SPD) won just 6 per cent, is further proof, for Fuchs, of “how much Germany’s democratic parties have neglected” social media and the younger voters to be found there.

Into this democratic vacuum the AfD pushes entertainingly-presented, snappily-edited, polarising and extremist solutions on migration, security and even pensions.

“That polarisation drives virality and leads to a higher visibility,” said Fuchs to Germany’s MDR television. “It’s a self-fulfilling system where the AfD is shown to people who didn’t even ask for the AfD.”

Using snappy slogans on political issues, ambitious AfD-aligned TikTokers are now openly questioning the big issues, such as postwar Germany’s consensus on the Nazi period.

This consensus is not about maintaining a permanent “guilt cult”, as the AfD claim. Instead the consensus gives all Germans responsibility to keep alive the memory of Nazi-era crimes, carried out by criminals with the silent consent of the wider population.

Compressed and distorted on TikTok, AfD-supporting influencer Eric Engelhardt attacked in a recent post the “woke” politicians in Germany who “want you to hate your country and go on and on about how your ancestors were criminals, that you are a criminal”.

[ State election results weaken Olaf Scholz and have ramifications for all of Germany ]

“It’s not a disgrace to be patriotic, it is your duty,” added Engelhardt. “You have to defend what others built up for you, you have to continue what others began for you.”

Though he has just 8,675 followers, Engelhardt’s videos – with titles such as “patriotic eastern Germans have side hair-partings” – have gone viral through the TikTok algorithm.

For Ahrens, embracing provocation as digital catnip is the most effective way to “get people’s thoughts where I want them”.

These include, judging by recent posts, warnings for “real” men not to drink beer because hops may contain oestrogen. Another recent Ahrens obsession: videos warning users not to eat meat from grain-fed animals.

Mixing derivative bro life hacks with innovative patriotic revisionism, the 30 year-old is clearly enjoying a new mainstream media notoriety as wunderkind, far-right bogeyman and propagandist-in-chief.

As Ahrens cheered in a recent article: “The old media have lost their monopoly on attention.”