BERLIN

Far-right extremism remains a serious threat to Germany's democracy despite a recent decline in explicitly extremist views, according to a major new study released on Wednesday.

The percentage of Germans with a clearly far-right worldview dropped to 3.3% in 2024/2025, from 8.3% in 2022/2023, according to the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's Mitte-Studie. The earlier spike came when right-wing movements mobilized people against COVID restrictions.

However, experts warned that those holding explicitly extremist views in Germany remained high compared to previous surveys conducted by these institutions, which found lower levels of 1.7% in 2020/2021, 2.5% in 2018/2019, 2.9% in 2016 and 2.5% in 2014.

The study, conducted with Bielefeld University, revealed worrying signs that far-right extremist views are becoming normalized in mainstream society. One in five respondents showed ambivalence toward far-right statements—neither clearly accepting nor rejecting them. "This gray area of 20% has solidified compared to the previous year and shows an openness to antidemocratic orientations," the experts warned.

Far-right extremist views were particularly high among Germans aged 18-34. Some 12.5% of them explicitly voiced support for xenophobic views in the representative survey, compared to 5.9% among those aged 35-64 and 6.5% among those aged 65 and older. Anti-foreigner sentiments were especially pronounced in Germany's ex-communist eastern states, where 11.1% of those surveyed expressed xenophobic attitudes, compared to 6.9% in the western states.