Social media is playing a huge part in Germany's most consequential election... whether we LIKE it or not

They might not win on Sunday, but the inexorable rise of the hard-right AfD party, which counts Elon Musk as a fan, has shaken mainstream politics by capturing the youth vote with its anti-migrant messaging

- Zak Garner-Purkis

PUSHING dyed blonde hair from her dark eyes, Nicole Kursch squints at her phone. Braced against the freezing Saxon cold, she taps the envelope logo on her screen to open the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

Nicole, 26, scrolls through the many direct conversations and semi-private group chats to get information about the upcoming German election.

Often she is scared by what she sees: videos of terrorist attacks, buildings exploding with fireworks and warnings about women's safety. All, in her eyes, are bound together by one overriding threat: immigration." "People are talking a lot about migration in the Telegram groups I'm a part of," she tells me. "They send around videos whenever there are attacks by migrants." Just days before we meet Nicole sipping coffee in Pirna, East Germany, a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker in a Mini Cooper injured 30 people by driving into a crowd in Munich.

It revived still-fresh memories of the murders of five women and a nine-year-old boy at a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg last December 20, in a horrifying attack that left 200 people injured when a Saudi man drove a car through the packed marketplace.

These shocking crimes have hardened Nicole's resolve to vote for the hard-right party Alternative für Deutschland - whose hardline policies she knows from videos on her TikTok and Instagram social media feeds -on Sunday when she steps into the polling booth.

A highly controversial organisation with a regional leader who can legally be described as "fascist" and groups on extremist watch lists, the AfD almost certainly won't be in government because none of Germany's mainstream parties will form a coalition with them.