Locked Out of Power: The Price of Germany’s Refusal to Work With the AfD
by Jaffa Levy
·
Published
· Updated
It began as a tactical barrier: an internal pledge among the Union parties that they would never cooperate with the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). What started as a moral gesture has since hardened into a structural feature of German politics. It divides the electorate, entrenches a permanent imbalance of power, and produces the very outcomes it was meant to prevent.
The electoral paradox
Germany’s conservatives built their barrier in 2018 to prevent voters from drifting to the populist right. Seven years later, the opposite has happened. The AfD has supplanted the Christian Democrats across much of the East, polling near 30 percent in Saxony and Thuringia and over 25 percent nationally. In Brandenburg’s 2024 election, the AfD came first in votes but was excluded from every governing combination. The Social Democrats, who had slumped to historic lows after the failures of the traffic light coalition, survived only because the exclusion mechanism kept the right divided.
Key dynamic: the barrier reduces governing options on the right while preserving leverage for parties on the left even when their overall vote share falls. The arithmetic changes rather than public enthusiasm.
At the federal level, the numbers tell the same story. In the February 2025 election, the Union parties and the AfD together commanded over 45 percent of the vote. Yet the centre right remains locked in an uneasy partnership with the very left wing parties it claims to oppose. The result is a government paralysed by contradiction, sustained not by public confidence but by arithmetic and taboo.
Observation: Germany’s coalition culture now functions less as a mechanism for consensus than as an instrument for containment. Political geometry is replacing political competition.
Who gains and who loses
For the left, the arrangement is a godsend. It ensures that no matter how far their vote share falls, they retain a decisive voice in government formation. It is the only reason the SPD still holds cabinet seats and the only reason the Greens are likely to enter the next coalition. In parts of East Germany, it has kept the left alive where it would otherwise have been extinguished.
Paradox: the AfD also gains. Shielded from ministerial responsibility, it is not tied to policy failures. Every unpopular reform and every scandal belongs to the establishment parties, leaving the AfD as the clean alternative.
The barrier spares the AfD from association with government failures. Every unpopular reform, every botched energy policy, every immigration scandal belongs solely to the establishment parties. By keeping the AfD out of responsibility, the political class has made it the only pure alternative in sight. As the economy worsens and frustration deepens, voters who want change have nowhere else to go.
The Union’s failing strategy
For the CDU and CSU, the mechanism has become self destructive. What was once a short term tactic has turned into an ideology of exclusion. Instead of stemming defections to the AfD, it has accelerated them. Across the East, the AfD now sets the agenda; in some regions it is within reach of absolute majorities. The Union, meanwhile, is trapped in coalitions with rivals who openly wish to replace them.
Prominent figures within the party, among them Peter Tauber, one of the original architects of the exclusion policy, have begun to question its purpose. Tauber warned that demonisation strengthens the AfD rather than weakening it. A number of CDU politicians from eastern states have joined him, calling for a new realism in dealing with the populist right. Yet Chancellor Friedrich Merz has doubled down, insisting there will be no cooperation in any form.
Strategic cost: an absolute stance may satisfy moral instinct but it narrows coalition space, hands procedural leverage to opponents, and cements the AfD as the default protest vehicle.
Pressure building, outcomes narrowing
Germany’s political system is now saturated with potential energy. Three outcomes are possible.
One. The Union persuades its current partners to adopt pragmatic reforms on energy, welfare, and migration that remove the issues feeding the AfD. This would defuse the crisis but requires a level of cooperation the left shows no sign of offering.
Two. The left pushes for a formal ban on the AfD through the Constitutional Court, using the apparatus of the state to eliminate its main competitor. Such a move would give the left an artificial super majority but at the cost of destroying democratic legitimacy.
Three. The barrier eventually breaks. Under electoral or internal pressure, the Union begins some form of cooperation with the AfD, either openly or through toleration arrangements in the Länder. This would trigger outrage from the left but could realign German politics in a matter of months.
Possible aftermath: whichever path emerges, the current balance cannot hold. The system is running out of safety valves, and voters sense it.
The likely path
Of these, the first seems naive and the second catastrophic. The third, though unthinkable today, is the most probable. Political systems cannot indefinitely deny half the electorate a route to power. When moral posture becomes institutional paralysis, collapse follows. The Union can continue reciting its prohibitions and losing ground, or it can confront reality and absorb the force it helped to create.
Germany’s right will not vanish by decree. The longer the exclusion persists, the stronger the alternative becomes.
X Reactions: Echoing “Locked Out of Power” & AfD Exclusion (Sep-Nov 2025)
Live embeds on CDU firewall failures, AfD surge, and Merz’s coalition woes—search #AfDFirewall for more.
German political hysteria about the AfD has created remarkably favourable conditions for the party, contributing enormously to its future prospects. This hysteria is so great that it is all but guaranteed to cement the CDU to the AfD if/when the firewall comes down. Were the AfD less politically demonised, left coalitions would remain an option for the CDU even after cooperation with AfD. Political change at the federal level would have little state-level resonance outside of East Germany. The AfD would be enormously disadvantaged, because the CDU could also seek coalition partners to their left, while the only prospects for the AfD would lie with the Union. (cf. here ÖVP and FPÖ in Austria).
If AfD cannot rule with an outright majority or potentially in a coalition with BSW, then you will see a 'firewall coalition' of CDU, SPD and BSW tolerated by Die Linke, basically identical to Thüringen right now. They would really do this, they have already done it.
🇩🇪 THE AFD EFFECT: HOW GERMANY’S POLITICAL FIREWALL BLEW UP IN ITS OWN FACE
Germany’s ruling class tried to quarantine the AfD. Instead, they made it contagious.
The “firewall” – a gentleman’s agreement amongst several parties never to work with them – was supposed to "save democracy."
It’s now dismantling it in real time.
The left clings to power it didn’t earn, the center-right immolates itself, and the AfD rises like a phoenix from the ashes of elite panic. This happens when a political tactic outlives its purpose but continues out of sheer moral inertia.
The CDU invented the firewall to stop AfD contagion. 7 years later, the AfD dominates the East and polls neck-and-neck nationally.
Every moral sermon, every “cordon sanitaire,” just reinforces the message: we’re the only real opposition left.
Merkel’s heirs can’t say it out loud, but they’re trapped – govern with the left and die slowly, or deal with the AfD and blow up the old order overnight.
The firewall didn’t protect Germany’s democracy. It just built the AfD’s launchpad.
Merz erklärt die AfD zum Hauptgegner und bekräftigt, mit ihm als dem CDU-Vorsitzenden werde es definitiv keine Zusammenarbeit mit der AfD geben. Damit bindet er die Union untrennbar an SPD und Grüne. So wird der Abstieg Deutschlands ebenso weitergehen wie der Niedergang der CDU.
BREAKING NIUS: Überhört von den meisten, bemerkt nur von den Kollegen vom Stern: Am Tag der Deutschen Einheit hat Friedrich Merz in einem Interview die wohl brisanteste Partei-Klausur seiner Kanzlerschaft angekündigt. Es soll am kommenden Sonntag um den Umgang mit der AfD und der "Brandmauer" gehen. In der CDU mehren sich die Stimmen, die das Konzept der "Brandmauer" für gescheitert halten. Brisanz: In Sachsen-Anhalt müsste die CDU in eine Koalition mit Linke, BSW uns SPD gehen, um die "Brandmauer" aufrecht zu halten.
MERZ glaubte die Linksextremisten mit seiner Anbiederung beruhigen zu können, indem er
▪️die 551 Fragen zurückzog, ▪️linke NGOs weiter mit hunderten Millionen Euro finanziert, ▪️den Linksextremismus der ANTIFA ignoriert, ▪️mit der linken SPD koaliert, ▪️die GRÜNEN wie Koslitionspartner behandelt, ▪️mit der LINKEN im Bundestag gemeinsame Sache macht und ▪️die AfD verdammt.
DAS GEGENTEIL IST DER FALL❗️
Die UNION bleibt der Feind von LINKSGRÜN und wenn die AfD abgeräumt ist, sind CDU und CSU dran.
Germany: As AfD soars, one CDU politician releases video message calling firewall against AfD ‘nonsense’. https://rmx.news/article/germany-as-afd-soars-one-cdu-politician-releases-video-message-calling-firewall-against-afd-nonsense/
