So yeah, regular right wing compared to American standards but I think we can all agree that respecting the trias politica is a good thing in any country.
This would be like declaring the entire American Republican Party extreme-far right because of a few whack jobs like the Proud Boys.
Opposition parties are extremely important to a properly functioning democracy.
What is so extreme and dangerous about the actual current AfD party members other than their anti-immigration stance?
I'll abstain from making any moral judgements about this, I don't feel qualified to do so but I understand that the historical context places a very large role in Germany.
Any association with Nazi's is condemned in the harshest way. The AfD has crossed that line several times in the past.
"The party's prevailing ethnic and descent-based understanding of the people is not compatible with the free democratic basic order. It aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society, to subject them to unequal treatment that does not conform to the constitution and thus to assign them a legally devalued status. Specifically, the AfD does not consider German citizens with a history of migration from Muslim countries, for example, to be equal members of the German people as defined by the party in ethnic terms."
Translated with deepl from https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilung...
(even if parts of the AfD may not be openly fascists, they still tolerate them in leading positions)
Germany has a wide range of political parties that cover the entire political spectrum. A party of extremists is not needed for a strong opposition. What German politics needs is momentum, and the will to actually get stuff done, even if it'll be unpopular. The fact that the AfD managed to use and abuse that mindset to gain popularity does not make them the right ones to make a positive impact. In fact, even putting their extremism aside, their contrarian and anti-progressive "everything new is woke" mentality is the exact opposite of what the country needs, for all I care.
I've answered your last question in a sibling comment to yours.[1]
Also their retoric: their default stance is the fundamental attribution error (my ingroup failed because we were betrayed/cheated, your outgroup failed because you are lazy/bad/inferior). When your bonapartist (which is cesarism+nationalism basically) ideology is tinted (or tainted I would say, but I'm biased) with that reasoning mistake, you're close to fascism. Some people could call them post-fascists, but to me post-fascism died in Italy in the 80s (not true, I have a post-fascist friend, but they're extremely rare). Because they're too dumb to have real 'thinkers' (and they don't read anyway), they rehash old ideas and dunk everything at the wall to see what stick (which can work l), to me they're closer to proto-fascists (see Balkan nationalists the the late 19th century).