It was created in 1981 by two punks in Hannover and took part in the 1998 election to the Bundestag with the promise to pay the voters with free beer.

The official communication organ is the paper Armes Deutschland ("Poor Germany"), formerly Asoziale Rundschau ("Asocial Review").

[1] The party was founded in 1981 by two 17-year-olds with the nicknames "Zewa" (a leading paper towel brand) and "Kotze" (vomit).

In the following years it was joined by many punks and organized many demonstrations, which were sometimes ended by the police, often leading to arrests.

In the 1997 Hamburg city elections, the APPD received a stunning 5.3% of the votes in St. Pauli and thus became the fourth-strongest party in that district.

In 1998, the APPD ran in the Bundestag election with Karl Nagel as its candidate for the chancellorship, and using slogans like "Work is shit" ("Arbeit ist Scheiße") and "Drinking!

The APPD failed, however, to gain the 0.5% of the votes needed to pay to the voters in the form of a promised large party with free beer.

With approximately 35,000, or 0.1%, of the votes, the APPD outperformed Lyndon LaRouche's "BüSo" and also the German Communist Party DKP.

A sufficient number of signatures were collected for participation in the European election 2004; however, these did not arrive because the German Postal Service declined to forward them to party chairman Christoph Grossmann.