> the AfD doesn't even pretend to care about normal people.

It explicitly cares about people who identify as traditional Germans, who in their own eyes are "the normal people".

On the economic side, Gemini tells me that they favour deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy for small and medium-sized enterprises (Mittelstand). They also want to increase family support payments to incentivise having children. These are all economic policies that make sense to conservative-minded "normal people".