The leading candidate, Friedrich Merz, a conservative who has adopted many of the AfD’s hard-line positions on immigration, used his closing statement of the debate to promise his voters that he would never allow the AfD into his government. Under him, he said, the firewall would hold.

Musk won AfD a massive new audience, and JD Vance added support. That brought the party outsized attention, but the impact in Germany was limited, data shows.