German AfD tries to shake off 'Tea Party' tag

"It's a one-issue party, they don't have policies across the political agenda the way the Tea Party do," said Tilford. "They've taken a stance on the euro, so some of the things they say sound similar, but I don't think it's fair to characterize them as a populist far-right party in the vein of the National Front in France or UKIP in the UK."

With so many academics in its ranks, the AfD likes to play its economic expertise as a strong suit. The AfD's founding argument is that not only is the eurozone crisis being mishandled, the single currency itself is fundamentally flawed. But confusingly, actually scrapping the euro is not in the party's manifesto. This lack of a clear banner policy on its main issue has somewhat undermined its popular appeal - a bit of a problem for a so-called populist party.

"The AfD never wanted to scrap the euro completely - there were different solutions," said Lüth. "One was to leave the euro, the other was divide up the euro to the north and south, according to the strength of different economies, the third was to return to national currencies, but that too didn't necessarily mean scrapping the euro, just that each country would be allowed to decide whether it wanted to leave or not."

Tilford sums up the positions neatly: "The German government is saying we're not going to pool risk, we're going to proceed with a strategy that has very much damaged the European economy, i.e. austerity in the south, and everything will be okay in the end," he said. "To my mind that sounds more like a Tea Party argument than the AfD one, which says, 'this cannot work because it involves us pooling risk and transferring power to other European countries.' "

But Ulrike Guerot, senior associate for Germany at The Open Society Initiative for Europe (OSIFE), thinks AfD's economic plans are unrealistic. "Dismantling the euro is simply not possible in an ordered way, as AfD suggest," she told DW. "Most Germans have made their peace with the euro and do not want go back to Deutschmark. They rather want a different kind of social policy in Europe and a different kind of European democracy, but this is not on offer with the AfD."