Or, perhaps, this is part of the same string of efforts supported by countries like Russia to discredit traditional political forces in Europe and the US in order to seed internal conflict that only benefits actors who do not benefit from strong liberal democracies.

> Or, perhaps, this is part of the same string of efforts supported by countries like Russia

Slightly related, but this morning I was reading a news story on a local website (I live in Eastern Europe, in a country that is a EU and NATO member) about the whole US budget debacle in the House Representatives, and the first (and until now only) comment was mentioning Ocasio Cortez (D) in a derogatory manner, even though she had not been named in said article at all and people around this part of the world don't have the slightest clue of who she is.

Sure enough, I soon found a recent article about Ocasio Cortez on the (in)famous sputniknews.com website where she was criticized for I don't know exactly what (I'm not going to link it here, don't want to give them the traffic) and then it all made sense, it looks like the Russian shill accounts have a new target now. In other words the hybrid and propaganda war is indeed real.

Afd was not in parliament in 2017, the purported date of the hack. Could also be a reason.

Where did you find that the date of the hack was in 2017. As far as I can tell it was until October 2018: "The leaked data, which was illegally collected until October 2018 and released December 2018, but just found now, is still publicly available."

https://mobile.twitter.com/JulianRoepcke/status/108109176879...

AfD stands for “alternative für Deutschland” and is another right wing party screaming loud. Nobody takes them seriously.

Well, they received 12.5% of the vote for the 2017 German Federal Elections, and, consequently have 94 seats (12.8% of the total) in the Bundestag -- I feel like it would be quite hard to argue that "no one takes them seriously" when 1/8th of the population took them seriously enough to vote for them.

Hasn't almost 1/5 of German voters voted on them? It's quite far from "Nobody takes them seriously". UKIP wasn't taken seriously as well, but it caused the biggest political crisis in decades.

AfD got 12.6% of the votes in the last federal election, with a turn out of 76.2%, which translates to 9.6% or less than 1/10th of the German electorate voting for them.

By curious conincidence, UKIP also got 12.6% of the UK vote in 2015, so the point still stands.

I wasn't commenting on "the point", just wanted to correct the guess/misremembered information that they got 1/5th of the votes.

AfD actually did influence German politics and policy making a lot, and public debate even more so, in my humble opinion.

From what I have seen, AfD is also a lot more "broadly extremist" than UKIP, but I am very probably pretty biased, being from Germany and having consumed far more German news than British.

Is the UKIP still a relevant party in any way?

I’m not sure. While I broadly agree with what SuddsMcDuff wrote, I literally can’t tell any more.

Trouble is, the UK political scene is currently entirely populated by people who lack the competence to realise there is anything wrong with their own strategies. (All of them, including the groups I used to consider ‘my side’).

So, they might be relevant by default.

Not really. They were seen as a single-issue party and as soon as the Brexit referendum happened their raison d'être disintegrated.

They are still going under different leadership, focusing on other typical right-wing issues. Depending on how things go with Brexit they might well come back into the limelight this year.

I must have confused it with the local elections result or a poll.

UKIP had a well published agenda (leaving the EU being the most prominent item).

AfD avoids making any commitment on what they really want to do[0], they only proclaim that everybody else sucks. They'd be a pretty sorry bunch if they'd end up having to govern.

[0] and I doubt that there's any coherent agenda to that end. At the time where they have to agree on something, I expect a huge fall-out between the camps within the party.