A significant proportion of the AfD’s supporters are explicitly Putinist. In the 90s, Germany gave citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Russian immigrants who had German ancestry (being descended from Volga Germans who migrated to Russia during Catherine the Great’s reign and subsequent waves). Most of these new Germans didn’t even speak German, let alone have any familiarity with post-1989 German democratic society. Nowadays they get their news from Russian state sources and form a far-right anti-liberal voting bloc that’s solidly AfD.