Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Far Right Failure: Parties of the Far Right in Germany, 1945-2023 -- Chapter 3: A Theory of Populist Far Right Issue Entrepreneurship in an Age of Dealignment -- Chapter 4: Emergence: The AfD and the European Debt Crisis in in the 2013 Federal Election -- Chapter 5: Breakthrough: The Refugee Crisis, Anti-Immigrant Sentiment, and the Success of the AfD in the 2017 Federal Election -- Chapter 6: Sustainment: The AfD and the COVID-19 Pandemic in the 2021 Federal Election -- Chapter 7: Strategies for Sustaining Success: Ideological Positioning and Fashioning a Party Brand -- Chapter 8: Sustaining Success Beyond the Core: Campaign Posters and the Professionalization of the AfD -- Chapter 9: Conclusion: Issue Entrepreneurship and the Future of the AfD.

This book traces the rise of the far right AfD from its inception in 2013 to its re-election to the Bundestag in 2021, emphasizing 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 topic of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) are largely limited to historical treatments and surface level analyses of the political party. This volume has the virtue of being both empirically rigorous as well as conceptually nuanced: it seeks to understand the party’s political trajectory and attraction to supporters by analyzing its voters using advanced quantitative methodologies, as well as interpreting the party’s communication strategies through mixed empirical methods. It embeds this account within a theoretically well-grounded argument. The argument emphasizes three important explanatory conditions – a favorable political opportunity structure, issue entrepreneurship, and the party’s stages of political development. Michael A. Hansen is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Turku, Finland. He previously held a Postdoctoral position at Lund University and was an Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin Parkside. Jonathan Olsen is Professor and Chair, Department of Social Sciences and Historical Studies at Texas Woman's University, USA.