Immigration Restriction and the Positive Vision that Animates It

AfD’s Quiet Embrace of Civilizational Restoration

Much of the discussion in both Europe and the U.S. surrounding Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) remains locked in a reflexive register of alarm. Founded in 2013, the party is often characterized as a protest movement—not entirely incorrect, but without attention to the substance of what it is actually proposing. What has been repeatedly overlooked is on the most fundamental issues shaping Western security and resilience, and the AfD is articulating a response that aligns closely with the civilizational demands that U.S. leadership has placed at the center of its own strategic doctrine: upholding freedom of speech, addressing erosion of its sovereignty, defending its Christian faith and culture.

In the 2025 National Security Strategy, the Trump Administration essentially asked whether our transatlantic alliances still rest on shared civilizational ground or whether they have been reduced to a transactional arrangement devoid of cultural and moral confidence. The strategy argues plainly that defense, economic, and security issues are “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure.” It further cites bad actors within Europe which are actively seeking to undermine its freedoms, institutions, and identity. It specifically identifies collapsing birthrates, political censorship, bureaucratic overreach, and the erosion of sovereignty as existential threats eclipsing even conventional post-war defense concerns.

Last February, Vice President JD Vance sharpened this challenge at the Munich Security Conference when he asked what Europe believes it is defending itself for: “What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?”

The positive vision is civilizational restoration: the recovery of a people confident enough to defend their inheritance—its families, its faith-shaped moral order, its freedom of conscience, and its right to be something distinct rather than something endlessly negotiable.

Measured against that standard, much of Europe’s ruling political class falls short. Germany is an interesting case in point, and it’s one of much importance, considering the outsized power it holds in the E.U. The entire continent’s illegal immigration crisis is dire, and while it must be solved, the U.S. posture suggests that strong border security is only part of the solution. Demographic collapse, delayed family formation, cultural fragmentation, and elite discomfort with defending any substantive account of German or European identity have hollowed out the very social foundations that the NSS identifies as indispensable. It is within this vacuum that the AfD’s platform must be understood.

The AfD’s 2025 party program (Wahlplan) begins with lengthy and detailed calls for remigration, deportation, and asylum reform. No doubt, AfD’s support is primarily predicated on their hardline immigration restrictionism. But following their immigration plans, nearly an equally long section is devoted to issues of life, values, and culture, beginning appropriately with the claim that the family—consisting of a father, mother, and children—forms the nucleus of society. Interestingly, this is not presented as a matter of private morality but as a civilizational necessity. Germany’s persistently low birthrate is treated as evidence that economic incentives alone cannot compensate for a culture that no longer affirms family formation as a social good.

Thus, the AfD platform states that schools should be expected to teach the proper meaning of marriage, partnership, and family cohesion so that young people are prepared to form stable households. It directly challenges a culture that elevates careerism and individual fulfillment while marginalizing those who sacrifice income or status to raise children. It advances an activating family policy intended to restore social recognition to caregiving and openly calls for the need to counter the child-unfriendly structures in all parts of German life.

Interestingly, the party’s message of civilizational renewal (including the explicitly Christian framing), has still led to growing support among nonreligious voters. Despite open hostility towards the party from both Catholic and Evangelical German church leadership, Christians support for AfD rose 10% from 2021-2024. Perhaps, as is the case with much of the appeal of the European right, AfD’s support is less a function of confessional loyalty than of shared concerns about sovereignty, social cohesion, and distrust of institutions—concerns that many voters perceive their ecclesial and political elites alike to be unwilling or unable to address.

In 2017, AfD party leader MP Alice Weidel, despite being openly lesbian, made the argument for marriage only between men and women. “If you soften that,” she said, “you immediately abolish the entire institution.” Her remarks speak to the Trump Administration’s question of “what binds us together,” as communities, nations, and civilizations. Those who lose their defining features eventually lose everything. Relatedly, her criticism of Islam and calls for a ban on the niqab and burqa are directly framed as a matter of “what the leading culture is,” which is Christian, not Islamic.

In its Wahlplan, the AfD applies the same framework to questions of life and human dignity. Its platform affirms the right to life as the foundation of all other rights, echoing the Christian moral architecture on which Western legal traditions were built. Abortion is characterized as a social failure shaped by pressure, fear, and hostile conditions rather than as a neutral expression of autonomy. The party supports enforcing existing German law, where abortion is illegal except under very specific circumstances, and advocates for more pregnancy care, while rejecting efforts to redefine abortion as a human right. It goes further to condemn paid surrogacy as child trafficking.

On transgender ideology, the AfD frames its position around the protection of children and the preservation of reality as a permissible category in public life. It calls for an end to state funding for gender-ideological programming, prohibits medical transition for minors, rejects puberty blockers, and demands counseling and adulthood as prerequisites for irreversible interventions. Central to this agenda is the insistence that speech grounded in biological fact must not be criminalized—a position that echoes American warnings against political censorship and the suppression of dissent as drivers of civilizational decay.

Perhaps most uniquely, the AfD’s Wahlplan devotes an entire section to children affected by divorce and separation. It prioritizes mediation, shared parenting arrangements where feasible, and child-support systems tied to actual caregiving time. It emphasizes keeping both parents involved in daily life and insulating childcare and schools from ideological experimentation.

Renewing and restoring culture occupies a central place in the AfD’s vision, but not in the way its critics often argue. Its articulation of German Leitkultur describes a shared inheritance shaped by Christianity, classical heritage, the Enlightenment, and Europe’s artistic and scientific achievements, resisting the ideological reinterpretations that reduce Western civilization to a record of oppression. No doubt Germany has a tough 20th Century history to contend with, but the AfD is correct to mark a decisive path forward. A country and a people consistently fraught with fear of healthy patriotism and of celebrating its Christian roots, for instance, will never be able to survive.

As the past year has shown, the Trump Administration’s standard for alliances is whether partners commit to freedom, human dignity, and the responsibility to defend the inheritance they received. What the average American may not realize now or even until the next decade is that the victory of civilizational oikophobia in Europe will burden them directly at home—as taxpayers, as farmers, as military families who will have to shoulder the burden of defending Western civilization alone—without reliable allies and without a Europe capable of securing itself.

Recognizing that fact does not require or constitute endorsement of all AfD policy, particularly its stances on Russia and the CCP. But anyone contending with Europe’s decline should recognize that the AfD—on immigration and civilizational values—is operating within the framework the United States has explicitly articulated: that sovereignty, culture, and freedom matter, and that security cannot be sustained where these foundations collapse.

There is a separate issue of exactly how the AfD will govern on these matters, specifically, contending with coalition factions and hostile EU actors, especially the courts.

But it is also worth mentioning that support for the AfD’s has only strengthened as party members have more clearly articulated their restrictionism and traditionalist views, and as the immigration crisis has gotten worse in Germany. In the 2025 elections, the AfD took sizeable votes from non-voters, center right, and even the socialists. Why? The German people, betrayed by Merkel’s leadership in 2015 and suffering the consequences in their communities, want leaders who address these issues with realism and pragmatism. Their voters seem to intuitively understand what U.S. has been saying: that border security and remigration is not all that’s required – there’s a cultural element missing too.

Ultimately, America is not asking Europe to invent a new identity. It is asking Europe to remember what it already is, and to work to restore it. Washington, take note: a platform seeking renewal for life, tradition, and family is winning in Germany.