Germany’s Strategy for Containing the AfD Is Reaching Its Limit
The AfD could win more than 40 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, yet every other major party intends to keep it from power. Germany is approaching a democratic test in which excluding the decisive winner may strengthen the movement that the firewall was designed to contain.
Germany’s political establishment has spent years debating how to prevent the Alternative für Deutschland from entering government. On September 6, voters in Saxony-Anhalt may make that strategy much harder to sustain.
The AfD is polling at 41 per cent in the eastern state. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union stands far behind at 26 per cent. The remaining vote is divided among parties struggling for survival, several of which may fail to cross the five-per-cent threshold required to enter the state parliament.
If the result resembles the polling, the AfD will not merely have advanced. It will have approximately doubled the 20.8 per cent it received in Saxony-Anhalt’s 2021 election and emerged as the dominant political force in the state.
That would not automatically give the party a government. Germany is a parliamentary democracy, not a winner-takes-all system. Governments require the confidence of a majority in the legislature. A party can finish first, even by a considerable distance, and remain in opposition if other parties command a majority between them.
But there is a difference between narrowly winning an election and receiving more support than the next two parties combined.
Winning 41 per cent would not give the AfD a legal entitlement to govern. Keeping such a decisive winner permanently outside government, however, would carry a serious political legitimacy cost.
That is the dilemma now approaching Germany.
The election Germany can no longer dismiss
Saxony-Anhalt has a population of little more than two million. It is not Germany’s largest or wealthiest state. It cannot determine national migration policy, withdraw Germany from the European Union or end Berlin’s support for Ukraine.
But the election carries a significance far beyond the state’s borders.
The AfD has already demonstrated that it can win elections and dominate parts of eastern Germany. It is the second-largest parliamentary group in the Bundestag after doubling its national vote to 20.8 per cent in the 2025 federal election. National polling now regularly places it near, level with or ahead of the CDU-led conservative bloc.
What it has not yet done is govern a German state.
Saxony-Anhalt may be the place where that final barrier comes under its greatest pressure.
The AfD formally opened its campaign in Magdeburg on July 18. Its candidate for minister-president, Ulrich Siegmund, is not presenting himself merely as a vehicle for protest. He is campaigning as a prospective head of government and has produced a programme for his first 100 days.
The proposals reportedly include expanding detention capacity for deportations, imposing work requirements on asylum seekers, withdrawing from the interstate agreement governing public broadcasting and beginning major changes in education, migration and cultural policy.
Siegmund has also promised a more visibly accessible administration, including video coverage intended to show the public how decisions are made inside the state chancellery.
Some of this is conventional populist presentation. Some falls within the powers of a state government. Other ambitions would face legal, financial and federal constraints. But the programme is important because it reflects the AfD’s transition from permanent opposition to a party preparing to use state institutions.
The question is no longer what the AfD says when it cannot govern. It is what it would do if it acquired control over ministries, schools, police administration, public appointments and cultural funding.
The case for the firewall
The case against allowing the AfD into government cannot honestly be reduced to establishment fear of losing office.
Germany’s postwar constitutional system was designed under the shadow of the Weimar Republic. Its architects rejected the assumption that democracy must remain passive while a movement uses democratic freedoms to destroy the democratic order itself.
The resulting principle is sometimes described as “militant democracy”. Parties may compete, organise and win representation, but the state is permitted to defend the free democratic order against forces seeking to abolish it.
Saxony-Anhalt’s AfD organisation has been classified by the state’s domestic-intelligence authority as confirmed right-wing extremist. The party disputes that designation and argues that Germany’s security machinery has been politicised against legitimate opposition.
Nevertheless, the classification cannot simply be ignored. Nor can the statements and associations that produced it.
Opponents fear that an AfD-led administration would not have to abolish elections to damage liberal democracy. It could alter senior appointments, redirect public money, place pressure on cultural and educational institutions and attempt to weaken bodies responsible for monitoring extremism.
Schools are already becoming an election battleground. The AfD argues that classrooms have been used to transmit progressive political values under the guise of democratic education. Its opponents fear that a promised “patriotic cultural policy” would replace education with a different form of ideological supervision.
There are also concerns about media independence. Ending Saxony-Anhalt’s participation in existing public-broadcasting arrangements would be presented by the AfD as an attack on an unrepresentative media establishment. Critics would regard it as an attempt to weaken institutions that scrutinise the party.
The firewall’s defenders therefore make a serious constitutional argument: no democratic party is obliged to deliver power to another party merely because it received the largest number of votes.
Votes determine the composition of parliament. They do not compel coalitions.
The democratic problem with permanent exclusion
That legal answer is sound. Politically, it is incomplete.
If the AfD receives 41 per cent while the CDU receives 26 per cent, the established parties may still be able to assemble a government without it. But that government could require cooperation among parties that disagree profoundly on taxation, migration, energy, public spending and social policy.
Its primary point of agreement would be that the election’s largest party must not govern.
Such an arrangement would be constitutionally legitimate. It might also be politically brittle.
The AfD would become the only major opposition to a coalition containing almost every competing tendency. Every unpopular decision could be attributed to the same establishment front. Every compromise among the governing parties could be described as evidence that their ideological disputes disappear whenever offices and access to power are threatened.
Most importantly, the AfD would remain protected from the burden of responsibility.
Opposition allows a party to promise policies without funding them, denounce institutions without administering them and exploit every government failure without being tested by the practical limitations of office. Permanent exclusion may prevent the AfD from exercising power, but it also prevents voters from discovering whether the party can deliver what it promises.
The firewall can therefore preserve the AfD’s most valuable political asset: grievance without accountability.
If an anti-AfD coalition subsequently fails, the party is unlikely to be blamed. It may return at the next election stronger still.
Merz’s strategic failure
Friedrich Merz understands the danger. His recent appeal to AfD supporters was striking because it acknowledged that the problem can no longer be contained through moral condemnation.
The Chancellor asked those voters to judge his government by its performance and to look beyond the political material presented to them on social media. He simultaneously reaffirmed that the CDU would not form a coalition with the AfD.
Merz is attempting to separate AfD voters from the AfD itself: to treat the electorate as recoverable while maintaining the party’s political isolation.
It is a rational strategy. So far, it has not worked.
The CDU has moved towards tougher language on migration and security, partly in an effort to retrieve conservative voters. But this may have validated the AfD’s diagnosis without persuading its supporters that the CDU possesses either the will or the freedom to implement the remedy.
If migration policy was not failing, voters may ask, why did the established parties change their language? If it was failing, why should those responsible be trusted to repair it?
The same problem applies to energy, deindustrialisation, sanctions and relations with Russia. Many eastern German voters believe that decisions taken in Berlin and Brussels have imposed disproportionate costs upon their regions. Whether every element of that belief is supported by the evidence is almost secondary to the political fact that the established parties have failed to dislodge it.
The AfD’s support cannot be explained entirely by poverty or eastern nostalgia. It is also a vote against a governing order that many people consider unresponsive, moralising and insulated from the consequences of its decisions.
Calling all those voters extremists is analytically lazy and politically self-defeating. Pretending that the extremist elements within the party do not matter would be equally dishonest.
Germany’s difficulty is that both facts exist at once.
Could the AfD actually govern?
A 41 per cent vote share might not produce an absolute majority of seats. The outcome would depend heavily on which smaller parties crossed the electoral threshold.
Votes cast for parties that fail to qualify are excluded when parliamentary seats are allocated. If the Greens, Free Democrats and Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance all fell below five per cent, the AfD could move much closer to a legislative majority without winning anything close to half of all ballots.
Even if it became the largest party, however, Siegmund would still have to secure election as minister-president by the state parliament. Without a majority, the AfD would need support or abstentions from elsewhere.
That is where the firewall would meet its real test.
The CDU says it will neither form a coalition with the AfD nor facilitate an AfD government. But parliamentary arithmetic can create pressures that campaign promises conceal. The choice might not be between an AfD administration and a stable conventional coalition. It could be between an AfD minority government, a fragile multi-party arrangement, prolonged deadlock or another election.
The firewall is easiest to maintain while alternative governments remain coherent. It becomes harder when every available alternative appears to contradict the result or requires incompatible parties to remain permanently bound together.
Why Europe should pay attention
An AfD breakthrough in Saxony-Anhalt would not immediately transform German foreign policy. But it would alter the political psychology of Germany and Europe.
The AfD favours a fundamentally different relationship with Russia, opposes much of the existing sanctions policy and challenges Germany’s continuing military support for Ukraine. It is hostile to deeper European integration and campaigns for the restoration of national authority over borders, migration and economic policy.
A state administration could not implement all of that. It could, however, obstruct federal initiatives through Germany’s decentralised institutions, influence national debate and demonstrate that the AfD is capable of acquiring and exercising executive power.
Its allies elsewhere in Europe would see the result as confirmation that the cordon around national-conservative parties is weakening. Its opponents would see a warning that Europe’s most important state is losing the political consensus upon which its postwar identity was built.
The consequences would reach beyond the right. Once the AfD became a governing party, every German party would have to decide whether to continue treating it as an exceptional threat or begin treating it as a permanent competitor.
Neither course is safe.
Normalisation could give an extremist tendency access to institutions it may seek to reshape. Continued exclusion could deepen the impression that Germany permits voters to express anger but not to change the governing order.
The firewall cannot substitute for government
The AfD may underperform its polling. The CDU may recover during the campaign. Smaller parties may cross the threshold and prevent the AfD from approaching a majority. German elections have produced surprises before.
But the structural problem would remain.
The firewall was designed as a protective boundary. It was never a programme for economic renewal, controlled migration, affordable energy or political representation. It can regulate how established parties respond to the AfD, but it cannot remove the conditions from which the party draws its support.
Nor can it permanently answer the question posed by millions of voters: if they support the same party in ever greater numbers, at what point will their vote be allowed to influence the government?
The constitutional answer is clear. No party is entitled to power without a parliamentary majority.
The democratic answer is more troubling. A system that repeatedly excludes its largest political force must demonstrate that the resulting government is effective, representative and more legitimate than the alternative. If it cannot do so, the firewall may cease to look like a defence of democracy and begin to resemble a defence of those already governing.
Saxony-Anhalt will not decide Germany’s future by itself. But it may reveal the limit of the strategy Germany has used to postpone that decision.
The country is no longer debating whether the AfD should be taken seriously. Its voters have already settled that question. The issue now is whether Germany can contain the party without confirming its most powerful accusation: that the political system will tolerate opposition only for as long as that opposition cannot win.
