Anna Leisten is cheerful, young and radical. That's how she appears in the many images she's posted on Instagram, at least.

She's one of the best-known faces of Germany's Junge Alternative (JA), or Young Alternative, the youth wing of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Her social media profile says she can be anything "from a braid-wearing sweetie pie to a forged-iron soldier."

The 23-year-old from Brandenburg plants her political messages between harmless-looking images. One, for instance, shows her lifting her hand to show the white power hand sign adopted by the radical right and neo-Nazis. It's the same sign right-wing extremist and Christchurch gunman Brenton Tarrant flashed in court.

Another shows her gazing up at Götz Kubitschek, one of Germany's most famous far-right extremists and an advocate for an antidemocratic "conservative revolution."

Then there's a picture of her looking battle-weary as she crawls through mud and under barbed wire. The caption reads, "Boot camp eastern front 2025." Apparently, the Young Alternative is dreaming of war.

Leisten appears to embody everything for which the Young Alternative stands. The group advocates radical change in Germany and the exclusion of anyone deemed "ethnically foreign" wherever possible. In February, an administrative court in Cologne ruled that "the Young Alternative is clearly an extremist movement," citing that reason.

The ruling also stated that the group's ethnic distinction of peoples violated........

© Deutsche Welle