German far-right AfD pressures Berlin on Ukraine aid as eastern support erodes

Chancellor Friedrich Merz stood in the Bundestag on September 9 and delivered a simple declaration: Germany would keep sending weapons to Ukraine. "We support Ukraine, and we will continue to support her, because she is also defending our freedom," he said, his words aimed directly at Alice Weidel, the far-right Alternative for Germany's co-leader, who had just urged him to abandon military aid and push instead for peace talks modeled on what Donald Trump was proposing.

Weidel's demand was not new. What was new was the confidence behind it. Three days earlier, on September 6, her party had won nearly 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, a state in the former East Germany. Combined with two other parties skeptical of Ukraine support—the socialist Left Party and the populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance—roughly 60 percent of voters in that state had chosen parties opposing or questioning German military assistance. Weidel was no longer a fringe voice. She was speaking from a position of electoral strength, and she was using it to reshape the terms of Germany's debate over the war.

Her pitch was straightforward and had teeth. Cheap Russian natural gas, she argued, was what Germany needed. The Ukrainian government, she claimed, had sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022—a suspicion that investigators have attached to a Ukrainian sabotage team—and Berlin was rewarding the suspected architects with billions in aid. Another AfD lawmaker, Jürgen Koegel, went further, speaking of "valued President Vladimir Putin" as no threat to NATO. The message was clear: end the aid, restore the energy relationship, and stop being dragged into a war Germany could not win.

Merz's firmness masked a deeper problem. Surveys revealed a sharp east-west fracture in German public opinion. In the western states, 39 percent of voters thought military support had gone too far. In the east—the former communist German Democratic Republic—that figure jumped to 54 percent. Johannes Varwick, a political scientist at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, told Deutsche Welle that the federal government's Ukraine course "does not have majority support in the east." But he pushed back against the suggestion that this reflected pro-Russia sentiment. "It comes from the desire to focus more on diplomacy rather than delivering ever more weapons to fuel a war which Ukraine cannot win," he said.

Fear was part of the calculation. In early August, Russia had launched a drone attack on Leipzig airport, a crucial hub for military shipments to Ukraine. The German government blamed Moscow. Lavrov called the accusation "the start of a real war." The exchange marked a new level of tension. Yet according to the latest ARD Deutschlandtrend survey, 56 percent of Germans felt strongly or very strongly threatened by Russia—but eastern Germans and AfD voters felt less threatened. Sven Leunig, a political scientist at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, offered a different reading: "It is less a fundamental rejection of support for Ukraine, more a reaction based on fear. They want to keep out of the conflict, so as not to be drawn further into it."

There was also the matter of money. The AfD and Wagenknecht's alliance argued that billions flowing to Ukraine could be redirected to Germany's strained social services. AfD lawmaker Gottfried Curio accused the government of cutting domestic benefits while "giving billions to foreign countries" to finance "foreign wars." It was a potent argument in a country wrestling with inflation and stretched welfare budgets.

Merz insisted he still held the political center. During the Bundestag debate, he declared that the AfD's path "is not supported by the majority in the German parliament and it is also not supported by the majority of the population." But the numbers told a more complicated story. Support for Ukraine, measured across years of ARD surveys, was eroding. The share of Germans who believed military assistance went too far had climbed to 42 percent—a slow, steady rise. Leunig believed the government still had "clear support" for its current course and that the Russian threat was becoming "widely recognized." But he added a warning: "If public support weakens in the long-term, the government will have to react to that."

Varick saw the problem differently. He did not argue for abandoning Ukraine but for rethinking the strategy. "Standing by Ukraine does not mean fueling a futile war of attrition without a viable political strategy," he said. Some observers had drawn parallels to Afghanistan, where two decades of Western military intervention and billions in spending had ended with the Taliban's return to power. Leunig rejected the comparison—Ukraine involved weapons supply, not ground forces—but acknowledged the parallel in public anxiety: the fear that the war would drag on indefinitely and that Ukraine might ultimately have to surrender anyway.

For now, Merz was holding the line. When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte visited Berlin on September 10, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul reaffirmed the commitment: "Germany will stay the course during this time." But the ground beneath that position was shifting, especially in the east, where the AfD's electoral surge had given voice to a growing skepticism about whether weapons and money could actually change the outcome of a war that many Germans increasingly saw as unwinnable.