Elections, explained.
The aftershocks of the result have been felt far beyond Saxony-Anhalt – and, indeed, far beyond Germany as well (Philipp Schulze via Getty Images)
Germany’s mainstream parties built a firewall against extremist politics –the latest election shows the cracks.
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AfD: The far-right earthquake in Saxony-AnhaltAfD: The far-right earthquake in Saxony-Anhalt
Home to only about two million inhabitants, the German state of Saxony-Anhalt is not a place that typically attracts global headlines. But when the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party won some 44% of votes in Sunday’s elections there (Opens in new window), political observers across the world were forced to take notice.
It is a remarkable set of events. In Germany the radical right stands on the verge of power for the first time in the country’s post-war history. The symbolism – if nothing else – speaks for itself. For the other parties, humiliated and politically destitute, there remain no good options. The aftershocks of the result have been felt far beyond Saxony-Anhalt – and, indeed, far beyond Germany as well.
Though the AfD’s vote share was the largest attained by any party at a German election in the past decade, it remains just short of a parliamentary majority. How a government is formed is not simply a constitutional matter for Saxony-Anhalt: rather, the next few weeks will be a stress-test for the entire German political system – with evident international resonances.
What unfolds now will tell us much about the manner in which other political parties deal with a proudly radical (and radicalising) far-right – not as a distant or abstract threat, but as a concrete, active, popular, disruptive, and destructive political force with its fingers brushing the levers of power. To be sure, Germany is not the first western polity to witness this. But no comparable democracy has constructed itself to such a degree upon its capacity to withstand the political extremes.
Germany, in other words, is a special case, and its lessons resonate with particular force.
No comparable democracy has constructed itself to such a degree upon its capacity to withstand the political extremes.
The key term here is the “firewall”, which the other parties – most notably, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Chancellor Friedrich Merz – have built up between themselves and the AfD. It prohibits them from formally cooperating with the far-right at the federal and state levels. There are both pragmatic and strategic reasons behind the policy, but for the CDU, it is above all a statement of political identity – of norm-abiding, democratic, centrist conservatism set against the flame-throwing and rabble-rousing extremes.
In Saxony-Anhalt, the “firewall” leaves two options for a government to be formed. First, some members of the CDU might, conceivably, break ranks with the firewall policy to support the AfD.
Alternatively – and more intriguingly – much might rest on the left-conservative populist party Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (Opens in new window) (BSW), which against expectations won enough seats to build a majority together with the AfD. Holding the “firewall” position of the other parties to be a strategic error, the BSW has held open the possibility of talking with the far-right on issues where they see some commonalities. In the end, the BSW might well tolerate an AfD government without joining it.
Sahra Wagenknecht, founder of left-conservative populist party Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, the party that has open the possibility of talking with the far-right on issues where they see some commonalities (Stefan Sauer via Getty Images)
A breakout force from the German far-left propping up the government of a party branch officially labelled “right-wing extremist (Opens in new window)” would be a striking illustration of the scrambled and fragmented spectrum of today’s politics. But overlapping policy positions do exist: the BSW rails against Germany’s renewable energy push and demands an end to German support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. Indeed, the tendrils of foreign policy run deep into local and regional votes. Not only have energy costs and the presence of Ukrainian refugees been key themes for both the AfD and the BSW, the recent drone attack in Leipzig, for which Berlin has pointed the finger at Russia (Opens in new window), gave ample ammunition for fearmongering about the war’s escalation, and what these parties see as Germany’s responsibility for it.
Should it gain power in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD will have no say over foreign affairs; Germany’s constitution is quite clear on which prerogatives belong to the state governments. A far-right government there will be able to affect much in culture, education, inner security and some fields of migration (Opens in new window) policy. But what will really count if the AfD manages to take power in Saxony-Anhalt will be the platform it supplies. A government seat in Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt’s capital, would be the loudspeaker with which the AfD can further push the national agenda in its own direction.
The dilemmas to which the result in Saxony-Anhalt has given rise articulate some wider problems posed by the AfD’s popularity across Germany – and indeed of similar parties across the world. Most strikingly, the election reveals just how ubiquitous the AfD has become: they dominate political thinking and political coverage like no other force. They have colonised the minds of the other parties. In Germany, elections are now framed simply as binary contests between the populist far-right and the rest, squeezing out the possibility of any electoral discourse taking place on the far-right’s own terms.
It is a common pattern. In France, the centrist candidates for next year’s presidential election are already framing themselves simply as the best alternative to Marine Le Pen, the far-right frontrunner. Le Pen has distanced herself from the AfD (Opens in new window); her strategy of “de-demonisation” stands in contrast to the unapologetic radicalisation that marks out her German counterparts, especially in that country’s East. But the power of the two movements has produced comparable political logics.
And what of the consequences for Germany itself? The AfD’s success will further intensify the pressures on Friedrich Merz. Though still relatively young, the government in Berlin creaks and groans under the weight of its own contradictions. 2026 has been brutal. What started as a hopeful year of reform has collapsed into a year of despair. Both governing parties – the CDU along with the Social Democrats (SPD) – have had a nightmare summer, packed with policy deadlocks and internal fights and culminating in rumours about ambitions to depose both sets of party leaderships. After the election in Saxony-Anhalt, Merz said he would not resign, but instead promised – however vaguely – “consequences (Opens in new window)”. Miserable results in other (Opens in new window) forthcoming elections in Germany’s East might just push him over the edge.
In the short term, the new political reality will chip away further at Merz’s reform agenda – and at the “firewall” as well. And in the medium term, leaders in other European capitals must brace themselves for a fundamentally changed political culture in Germany – and thus for a government in Berlin that is ever more mired in its domestic troubles and incapable of initiative on the world stage.
About the author
Marcus Colla
Marcus Colla is Associate Professor of Modern European Political History at the University of Bergen, Norway.
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