The AfD Has Won. Germany Does Not Know What Comes Next

The Alternative for Germany has won 43.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, becoming the largest party in every municipality and inflicting a historic defeat on Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU. Yet the AfD remains three seats short of governing alone. The result is the culmination of a 13-year transformation in which Germany contained the party institutionally but failed to answer the grievances that carried it from an anti-euro revolt to regional dominance.

The result Germany was told could not happen

The scale of the AfD victory matters as much as the fact of it. Ulrich Siegmund’s party did not edge narrowly ahead of a divided field. It received approximately two and a half times the CDU vote and finished with more support than several established parties combined. The CDU, which governed Saxony-Anhalt and won 37.1 per cent five years ago, has lost roughly half its electorate.

Yet the result contains an immediate paradox. The AfD has won the election overwhelmingly, but Germany is a parliamentary democracy and the largest party has no automatic right to govern. Siegmund must command sufficient support in the Landtag to become minister-president. Every other major party entered the election refusing to place the AfD in power.

The AfD has crossed one boundary without crossing the next: it has become the dominant electoral force across an entire German state, but has not proved that it can turn that mandate into executive authority.

It began as a rebellion by economists

The party that now dominates Saxony-Anhalt did not begin principally as an anti-immigration movement. Founded in 2013 by figures including economist Bernd Lucke, journalist Konrad Adam and chemist and businesswoman Frauke Petry, the AfD emerged from opposition to eurozone bailouts and the transfer of German liabilities to weaker economies.

Its name challenged Angela Merkel’s insistence that the response to the euro crisis was alternativlos — without an alternative. The early party attracted professors, fiscal conservatives, business figures and voters who believed that fundamental questions of economic sovereignty had been removed from democratic argument. It narrowly missed entry into the Bundestag in 2013, receiving 4.7 per cent.

That mechanism continued after the euro crisis receded. Whenever Germany’s governing parties treated a contested policy as technically unavoidable or morally settled, the AfD organised those who wanted it reopened.

Migration transformed the party

The decisive transformation came in 2015. Petry defeated Lucke for the leadership; Lucke and much of the economically liberal and Atlanticist wing departed. At almost the same moment, Merkel’s refugee policy gave the AfD a cause capable of joining borders, Islam, security, welfare and national identity into a single political argument.

The established parties largely debated how migration should be administered. The AfD questioned whether migration should continue on that scale at all. In 2017 it entered the Bundestag with 12.6 per cent, converting a specialised revolt against euro governance into a durable national movement.

Subsequent restrictions imposed by mainstream governments did not necessarily recover those voters. Instead, each tightening risked confirming that the problem identified by the AfD had been real, while leaving voters to ask why the parties responsible for the earlier policy should be trusted to reverse it.

This does not vindicate collective suspicion of Muslims, ethnic nationalism or indiscriminate proposals for “remigration”. Parts of the AfD became markedly more radical as the party grew. But reducing its expansion to racism alone fails to explain why millions moved toward it and why the movement became embedded in the east.

Why the breakthrough came in eastern Germany

Saxony-Anhalt cannot be understood merely as a poor region voting in anger. Its grievance is comparative, institutional and historical. Reunification succeeded constitutionally, but many eastern Germans experienced it as the replacement of one governing order by institutions, managers and narratives imported from the west.

The region subsequently endured population loss, the departure of younger workers and the disappearance of industries and civic structures. Saxony-Anhalt’s real economy contracted by 0.2 per cent in 2025. Employment has followed a negative trend since 2022, with manufacturing particularly affected. During 2025 the population fell by more than 15,000 to approximately 2.12 million.

This is not universal destitution: disposable income has risen and some districts have grown. The political force lies in the contrast between individual improvement and a wider impression of regional contraction.

Eastern voters also possess a different relationship with authority. Many have lived through one collapsed political system and are unusually suspicious of official language, media unanimity and moral instruction from distant institutions. Their historical relationship with Russia is different from that of western Germans, while the economic costs of sanctions and expensive energy are felt keenly in industrial communities.

The AfD turned these experiences into an accusation: decisions were being taken in Berlin and Brussels by people insulated from their local consequences. Eastern voters are not voting only against migration. Many are voting against the authority of a western German political order that has spent 35 years explaining their region to them.

Covid and Ukraine widened the field of grievance

During the pandemic, the AfD attracted opponents of lockdowns, vaccination requirements and emergency government. Civil-liberties questions became mixed with conspiracy theories, but the party became a gathering point for people who distrusted experts, public broadcasters and the administrative state.

The war in Ukraine then added foreign policy, energy and peace to its appeal. The AfD opposed weapons deliveries and sanctions, demanded restored relations with Moscow and questioned both the destruction of Nord Stream and the scale of German assistance to Kyiv. It presented itself as the party of negotiation while Merz and the centrist parties spoke increasingly of military preparedness.

The strongest answer to the AfD is that Russia invaded a sovereign country and that ending German assistance would not compel Moscow to make peace. It could reward aggression and leave Ukraine defenceless. AfD rhetoric frequently understates Russian responsibility.

Nevertheless, the party benefited because scepticism about sanctions, military escalation and open-ended expenditure had few other parliamentary outlets. When every substantial party supported broadly similar policies, the AfD acquired ownership of nearly every objection to them.

The German economic model began to break

Germany’s strength rested upon competitively priced Russian energy, expanding Chinese markets, export-led manufacturing and an American security guarantee that limited its defence burden.

Those conditions changed together. Russian energy was severed, China became an industrial competitor as well as a customer, American protectionism threatened exports, and the automotive and chemical industries came under pressure. The constitutional debt brake restricted civilian investment even as Merz made room for substantially higher military expenditure.

Economics alone does not explain the victory. Migration, identity and eastern experience cannot be reduced to factory statistics. But the costs of geopolitical change were visible in employment, energy bills and local decline, while the promised strategic benefits remained distant.

The AfD’s prescriptions may make matters worse. Weakening the European Union would endanger the market upon which German exporters depend; severe immigration restrictions could deepen labour shortages; hostility to renewable investment could cost Saxony-Anhalt emerging industries. But the established parties cannot defeat that argument merely by identifying the defects in the AfD programme. They must explain why their own supposedly responsible stewardship produced stagnation, industrial anxiety and collapsing trust.

The firewall protected the AfD from responsibility

Germany’s political firewall, or Brandmauer, is a commitment by the established parties not to cooperate with the AfD. It is not a constitutional rule, and no party is obliged to deliver office to another merely because it won the most votes.

The case for exclusion is substantial. Saxony-Anhalt’s AfD organisation has been classified by the state domestic intelligence authority as confirmed right-wing extremist. A state government would control policing, education, appointments and cultural funding. Germany’s principle of militant democracy holds that constitutional government need not remain passive toward forces seeking to hollow it out.

But the firewall was never an answer to the conditions producing AfD support. It kept the party outside government while protecting it from responsibility. Opposition allowed the AfD to promise without budgeting, denounce without administering and attribute every failure to a governing establishment that increasingly appeared to encompass almost everyone else.

Broad anti-AfD coalitions blurred the differences among mainstream parties. Surveillance and prohibition debates strengthened the claim that institutions were policing the boundaries of acceptable opposition. The firewall contained the AfD’s access to office, but not its electorate. In Saxony-Anhalt, it preserved grievance while postponing accountability.

Victory without power

The new Landtag now exposes that strategy’s limit. The AfD holds 39 seats. The other parties hold 44, but they range from the CDU and Greens to The Left and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. They possess a numerical majority without sharing a coherent programme.

The CDU rejects cooperation with the AfD and has historically rejected cooperation with The Left. BSW criticises the firewall but has said it will not elect either Siegmund or incumbent CDU minister-president Sven Schulze. The alternatives include an exceptionally broad arrangement of defeated parties, a minority administration dependent on shifting support, defections or abstentions, prolonged deadlock or another election.

A government assembled from almost the entire remaining political spectrum would be constitutionally legitimate. It could nevertheless appear to many voters to exist chiefly to reverse the election’s clearest verdict. Permitting the AfD to govern solely because it finished first would be an equally serious distortion of parliamentary democracy. Votes determine the legislature; majorities determine the government.

Germany can still keep the AfD from office, but it can no longer pretend that exclusion resolves the political question.

A verdict on Merz and the German centre

Merz promised to reduce AfD support by tightening migration policy, restoring economic confidence, strengthening German leadership and maintaining the firewall. In Saxony-Anhalt, the CDU instead lost approximately half its vote.

Moving toward tougher language may have validated the AfD’s diagnosis without persuading its supporters that the CDU possessed either the will or political freedom to implement the remedy. One eastern state cannot predict Germany’s next federal election, and Saxony-Anhalt is unusually favourable territory for the AfD. But 43.8 per cent cannot be dismissed as an eccentric protest on the margins.

The party that began by disputing eurozone bailouts has become the repository for opposition to migration, pandemic government, sanctions, military escalation, green regulation, cultural liberalism and the authority of Germany’s postwar institutions. Its victory does not prove that its policies would work, erase the extremist forces within it or entitle it to power without a parliamentary majority.

It proves something narrower but still devastating. Germany isolated the AfD, condemned it, investigated it and denied it coalition partners, yet it became the dominant party across an entire state. The firewall may still keep Ulrich Siegmund from the state chancellery. It cannot conceal what happened at the ballot box.

Germany succeeded in keeping the AfD outside government, but failed to keep millions of voters inside the political settlement. Saxony-Anhalt is the point at which that failure became impossible to deny.