DUISBURG, Germany >> It was a warm spring day in Duisburg, a rusty industrial hub in Western Germany, and Alan Imamura, a member of the City Council, was chatting with constituents in a shop-lined pedestrian mall on the city’s impoverished north side.

Until recently, Imamura said, he was not welcome in places like this. That is because he is a leading local figure in the Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, a far-right party whose national organization was recently declared an extremist group by the country’s domestic intelligence service.

Much of the AfD’s support comes from the former East Germany. But in recent years, it has developed a beachhead in parts of Western Germany. During February’s federal elections, several neighborhoods in Imamura’s district gave the AfD some of its best results in the country, coming close to 40% of the vote.

“It’s so different,” he said. “You would not imagine, five years ago — when I put up some posters, people spat on me. And today the people, they say, ‘Finally.’”

The AfD emerged over a decade ago around skepticism against the euro, but it soon morphed into a party built on the denigration of immigrants and refugees, one of the reasons it was designated as extremist.

A confidential, 1,018-page report by the domestic intelligence service, which was not released but was reviewed by Der Spiegel magazine, documents what it called “an entrenched xenophobic mindset” within the “top leadership structures of the AfD.” For example, Bjorn Höcke, who leads the AfD in the Eastern state of Thuringia, has repeated Nazi-era slogans and called for “large-scale” deportations with “well-tempered cruelties.”

Such talk has not dampened the AfD’s ambitions. After making steady gains in elections over the past five years, it is now trying to position itself to become the dominant party in Germany by the next federal election, in 2029.

Doing so, though, means branching out beyond its base in the East, which has a population of just over 14 million, less than the single state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Duisburg lies. It also means tweaking its messaging to appeal to a new audience of voters.

“I can give different rally speeches in the former West and former East Germany,” said Peter Boehringer, an AfD representative from the Western state of Baden-Württemberg. “With Westerns, you still have to convince them.”

The agenda, though, has not changed. In the West, the blatant xenophobia, which gets less traction there, is couched in appeals to issues like law and order. Candidates lean into concerns over industrial decline, not civilizational decline. And the party puts forward figures like Imamura, who can persuasively speak to the working-class resentments bubbling up in places like Duisburg.

The son of a Japanese American soldier and a German mother, Imamura, 51, grew up in Bavaria and studied business administration in college, then worked for UPS as an account manager. In 2013, he and a small group of friends started the AfD’s Duisburg chapter.

Imamura is affably unpolished, coming across as an Everyman who got angered by the system and is telling it like it is.

“Politicians say, oh, no, you’re imagining things, everything’s beautiful,” he said. “But people on the street level, they see it’s not in the right direction.”

While AfD politicians in the East speak openly about making Germany safe for “civilized whites,” as the domestic intelligence service reports, Imamura avoids such explicitly racist language.

Instead, he talks about mass immigration as a strain on city budgets and schools, and draws distinctions between unskilled immigrants, whom he blames for Duisburg’s increasing crime rates — violent crime was up 8% last year — and skilled immigrants, whom he says Germany should encourage to come.

“For the ones we want, it should be not be as difficult,” he said. “And the ones that we don’t want should be regulated.”

Like many AfD figures in the West, Imamura offers a business-friendly, small-government gloss on the national party’s position, hearkening back to its roots as a euroskeptic movement while skating around its turn toward the far right.

He and other Western AfD politicians can sometimes sound like a Germanic MAGA. Imamura recently had hats made with “Make Duisburg Great Again” on the front, though in AfD blue, not Trumpian red.

Experts see a clear strategy in how the AfD is trying to build support in the West.

“In Western Germany, they offer more subtle complaints about the economic situation,” said Conrad Ziller, a political scientist at the University of Duisburg-Essen. “They really use specifically targeted advertisements for postindustrial decline.”

The strategy has had some success. The local party’s emphasis on economic frustrations clicked with the people Imamura met with in the neighborhood of Neumühl, where the AfD won 36.4% of the vote in February’s national election.

“German politicians have always found a way to talk around everything, and the AfD is speaking straight ahead,” said Clive Fleming, who moved as a child from England to Duisburg in 1978, and now owns a cleaning service.

For well over a century, Duisburg was a thriving city built on heavy industries like metals, chemicals and coal mining. It is home to Thyssenkrupp, Germany’s largest steel producer.

It was also the heartland of the left-leaning Social Democratic Party, which once dominated local and federal elections here. Even in the mid-2000s, the Social Democrats could count on 60% of the vote in northern Duisburg.

But deindustrialization has put Duisburg into a slow, painful decline. Today, a city that practically guaranteed high-paying jobs a generation ago has an unemployment rate of 13.4%, versus 3.5% for Germany overall.

Similar stories can be told about similar cities in Western Germany, like Essen and Gelsenkirchen, where the AfD has likewise surged in recent years.

Ziller, the political scientist, said industrial decline occurred as the Social Democrats embraced issues like climate change and liberal immigration laws, stances that failed to resonate with their working-class base.

In February’s elections, the Social Democrats won just 21.3% of the vote in Neumühl, a drop of almost 10 points from 2021.

Mahmut Özdemir, the Social Democrat who represents northern Duisburg in the federal parliament, declined a request to comment.

Despite the party’s aggressively anti-immigrant stance, its efforts have paid off. A study by the German Center for Integration and Migration Research in March found that voters with a migration background were just as likely as ethnic Germans to support the AfD, at around 20% nationwide.