German Police and AfD: What Data Shows
- Berlin's Governing Mayor Kai Wegner reportedly warned internally that the CDU is losing police support to the AfD, partly blaming dissatisfaction with salary back-payments.
- A 2024 federal government-funded study found 42% of German police officers agreed they held a negative attitude towards asylum seekers, with 37% describing an ambivalent stance.
- Experts and union officials dispute the claim that pay grievances are the main driver, pointing instead to officers' daily exposure to crime and their focus on migration policy as
Claims that Germany's police forces harbour a disproportionate number of Alternative für Deutschland supporters have circulated for years, but reliable statistical evidence remains scarce. The debate has sharpened after Berlin's Governing Mayor Kai Wegner, of the CDU, reportedly expressed internal concern that his party is "losing massively to the AfD" among officers — attributing the drift in part to dissatisfaction over salary back-payments.
Pay grievances or something deeper?
Experts are sceptical that pay disputes are the primary explanation. Heiko Teggatz, chairman of the police trade union, points instead to the daily professional experience of officers. "Polizisten haben nahezu täglich mit der Kriminalität auf der Straße zu tun und erleben die zunehmende Gewaltbereitschaft am eigenen Leib," he said — police encounter street crime virtually every day and feel the rise in violence personally. Teggatz argues that their legal powers are often insufficient to tackle offending effectively, and that this channels police political attention firmly towards domestic security and migration.
Migration as the decisive link
Electoral researcher Hermann Binkert of INSA identifies migration as the issue that most benefits the AfD among its voters, and notes the party is widely perceived as competent on the subject. That perception, he suggests, becomes self-reinforcing the more migration-related problems dominate public debate. A study from the University of Saarland, cited in the source material, supports this framing: the stronger an individual's concern about migration, the more likely they are to support the AfD — a correlation that holds even after controlling for economic and social disadvantage.
Prof. Werner Patzelt, formerly of TU Dresden, adds a demographic observation: surveys indicate that police officers are on average positioned slightly further to the right politically than the broader population, and that they are confronted more frequently than other professional groups with what he describes as the negative consequences of Germany's migration policy — circumstances which, he contends, have contributed substantially to the AfD's rise.
Federal study: attitudes inside the force
The most concrete figures come from the Megavo study, funded by the Federal Interior Ministry and published in 2024. It found that 42 per cent of police officers surveyed agreed they held a negative attitude towards asylum seekers, while a further 37 per cent described their stance as ambivalent. The study does not, however, directly measure party-political allegiance.
Dissenting voices challenge the thesis
Not all analysts accept the premise. Prof. Arne Schönbohm, who teaches at the Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg and serves as president of the federal civil service academy, told the source that his work alongside police, intelligence services and police unions gives him no grounds to confirm a particular affinity for the AfD within security authorities. He describes instead "a pronounced professional identity and a critical distance towards political extremism." Manuel Ostermann of the Federal Police union echoes a related point: officers, he says, respond positively to politicians who respect their work, take their interests seriously, and keep their promises — a formulation that implies party affiliation follows treatment, not ideology alone.
The evidence, such as it is, suggests that migration policy — rather than wage disputes or an ideological disposition — is the central factor drawing some officers towards the AfD. Whether that constitutes a systemic problem within German law enforcement or a reflection of broader societal anxieties remains, in the absence of robust polling data, an open question. The debate around police officials and AfD-adjacent conduct shows no sign of easing.
Topics
People
Organizations