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What's your reason to believe this? Russia must have supported the opposition to gain some control, but the AfD was made popular by constant media attention, like this poll is published.
In comparison to other parties there were constant reminders that the AfD exists. Die Linke and BSW don't receive the same attention and other right wing parties like NPD or Republikaner didn't.
The media is controlled by the German elite. They are either ridiculously incompetent or they chose to make AfD popular.
Kremlin fund both fringe left and right. Kremlin pays lip service to the far left by invoking the anti Western imperialist sentiment. When I used to watch RT before it got banned, they always invite anti-colonial/anti-imperialist commentators. While the narratives are true, it is obvious that it is bait and switch from Kremlin to paint the West bad while downplaying Russia's own wrongdoings. I mean, there are many leftists who disappointingly refuse to call out the Russian invasion of Ukraine or directly call Putin a dictator, from Jill Stein of US Green Party to Sarah Wagenknecht of BSW in Germany. That is very telling. But even some on the left who are probably not in Putin's pocket, they become useful idiots for blaming Ukraine and NATO for supposed expansion which triggered the invasion of Ukraine. The current Irish president, as charming as he is, he expressed the sentiment that it was somehow NATO's fault for Russia's invasion.
As for the far right's relationship with Kremlin, the money trail is much clearer but Putin and his regime pay lip service as well to the right. Putin gave more cultural influence to the church in Russia by championing traditional family values and demonizing child-free ideas. This cultural lip service (as well as under the table cash) endeared him to the rest of the far right across the globe.
Putin is betting on both fringe far left and far right to cause as much disinformation campaign in the West as possible. He doesn't care which side wins so long as the West is destabilised. But IMO the reason that the far left is not really getting much traction is because the collapse of communism is still within living memory and fresh in many people's minds. It collapsed like only 30 years ago? Boomers, Gen X and older millenials remember the communist regimes. In their minds, why vote for those assholes again? The far right, in the meanwhile, is gaining ground because people who lived under fascism are pretty much dead at this point. No one alive to talk about the fascist atrocities and those who never lived under it are enamoured and manipulated.
I hope that it is like that but I believe that we are on a way to fascism that is pushed by Western elites and not Russia.
The planned loss of online privacy and the lockdown of android phones make me believe that the shift to far right parties is just a piece in a bigger puzzle.
The Russia started actively supporting neo-nazistic organizations in ex-USSR countries around year 2005. That was documented back and there were news articles about that. For example in Ukraine that caused the prevalence of a nazi problem to increase steadily year after all the way until 2014 when that development got cut and the prevalence started decreasing.
Back then, 20 years ago, when there was more media attention about it, it was done only in ex-USSR countries, but it would be weird if the same concept hadn't been extended to EU countries as well. Why wouldn't it have been? It has worked extremely well for Putin in the original area, and there's no reason to assume it wouldn't work for him the same way within EU countries as well.