“We Are Their Voice”: German Far-Right Builds Balkan Alliances

At 28 years old, Frohnmaier is the youngest MP for Alternative for Germany, or AfD, the right-wing populist party that shot to prominence in Germany in part by railing against an influx of mainly Muslim refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa since 2015. It is now the third largest party in the Bundestag.

Frohnmaier's own immigrant background has proved no obstacle to his rapid rise up the AfD ranks.

And since seizing a national platform, the balding, bespectacled MP is now putting his Balkan roots to good use by seeking out like-minded figures in the region, Croatia and Serbia in particular.

Contrary to a widely-held perception in the West of the Balkans as a source of ethnic nationalism and instability endangering Europe, recent years have seen the emergence of a reverse trend, with the export of far-right ideology from Western Europe to the countries of the Balkans, fanning the flames of Islamophobia and historical revisionism.

The targets are not just politicians and political parties, but church figures and intellectuals too, via dozens of meetings, conferences, panel discussions, seminars and other events, according to the findings of a BIRN investigation.

The outreach is designed to rise above divisions rooted in the wars of Yugoslavia's collapse in the 1990s.

While others in AfD are making inroads in Croatia, Frohnmaier said the party was actively inviting Serbs and the Serbian Orthodox Church to see the AfD as "a place where their needs are taken seriously," tapping a rich vein of hostility towards NATO and the EU and an affinity for Russia among Serbs.

"We are natural partners," he said. And AfD is not the only party looking to the Balkans.

Boris Buden, a Berlin-based philosopher and...