Germany's far-right AfD breakthrough reshapes European politics

In the early hours of Monday morning, as results trickled in from Saxony-Anhalt, a state in the former communist east of Germany, the scale of what had happened became impossible to ignore. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland—the AfD—had won 44 percent of the vote, a historic breakthrough that left Europe's political establishment visibly shaken. France's European affairs minister, Benjamin Haddad, called it "a very grave moment for Europe." The shock was palpable enough that it seemed to ripple across the continent: as the German results came through, hundreds of black-clad activists were clashing with police along England's south coast, battling over migrant arrivals in a second night of confrontation.

What made this moment so significant was not merely the size of the AfD's victory, but what it represented. For the first time since the Nazi era, a far-right party had been propelled to the brink of power at the regional level in Germany, despite thirteen years of deliberate efforts by mainstream parties to exclude them from government. The turnout told part of the story: 77.8 percent of voters cast ballots, compared to 60.3 percent five years earlier. The AfD had mobilized people who had not voted at all in the previous election. Ulrich Siegmund, the party's lead candidate and a former perfume salesman, had become the face of this surge. Der Spiegel had put him on its cover two months earlier, calling him "Germany's most dangerous man." His response was to film himself signing copies for his 800,000 TikTok followers.

On the ground in Magdeburg, the state capital, the mood was fractured. A paramedic named Eric, whom a Guardian correspondent encountered fundraising for a local hospice, described how his father had spent years obtaining a German passport after migrating from Guinea. "Already that day he felt the mood on the street had become more hostile," the correspondent reported. Conversations with residents revealed the emotional weight of the result: a couple in their later years, who had grown up under communism, were heartbroken; a sixteen-year-old who had arrived from Syria under Angela Merkel's 2015 open-borders policy was frightened she would be first on a deportation list; a woman who had voted AfD objected to being "tarred with the same brush" as Nazi supporters, even as she spoke standing beside a Stolperstein, a memorial plaque to a Nazi persecution victim. Meanwhile, thousands gathered at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate to protest the result, their sense of dread and disbelief mounting as the numbers became official.

The rise of the AfD was not driven by a single cause but by a convergence of grievances. Friedrich Merz, the chancellor and leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, had been elected in 2022 on a pledge to halve the AfD's vote. Instead, it had doubled, and support for his centrist coalition had collapsed. Polling analysis suggested that while roughly one in three AfD supporters aligned with the party's extremist ideology, the broader surge came from voters who felt abandoned by mainstream politics. Siegmund had weaponized discontent around the faltering economy and migration, even though irregular immigration had actually declined since Merz took office. Research from 2023 had found a direct correlation between rent increases—particularly among lower-income households—and support for the AfD. The party had also capitalized on ostalgie, a nostalgia for communist East Germany, and on resentment among poorer eastern Germans who saw themselves as second-class citizens compared to their western counterparts. Strikingly, one of the AfD's strongest demographic groups was voters aged thirty-five to forty-four, people who had been children or infants when the Berlin Wall fell.

Now the question was what came next. Siegmund had rejected leading a minority government, but initial signals suggested the AfD could form a coalition with the hard-left, pro-Russian Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht party, which had received 5.3 percent of the vote. If Siegmund became the state's first far-right governor, he would control significant policy areas: education, policing, and public broadcasting. The AfD had already proposed curriculum revisions described by party members as "more Bismarck, less Hitler," along with defunding anti-racism initiatives and removing pride flags. The party might also reshape civil service recruitment to create what one observer called "a more supportive environment." Control of Saxony-Anhalt would also give the AfD seats in the Bundesrat, the upper house of parliament, where they could act as a disruptive force, though not block legislation outright.

The implications extended far beyond one state. The AfD was leading in national polls, and more state elections were scheduled for later in the month, including in traditionally liberal Berlin, where the party was polling at 18 percent. As the AfD's vote share rose across states, the arithmetic for coalition-building without them became increasingly difficult, further weakening the mainstream's capacity to govern. Notably, not all of Europe's far-right leaders welcomed the AfD's success. France's National Rally, which had spent years rehabilitating its image under Marine Le Pen, insisted publicly that the AfD was "way too extreme." Two years earlier, the National Rally had expelled the AfD from its European parliamentary group after revelations that the party backed mass deportations and had downplayed Nazi SS crimes.

But the consequences would not be contained to Germany. A weakened German government in turmoil would inevitably affect the European Union's capacity to act. The AfD's climate skepticism and pro-Kremlin stance posed direct challenges to EU policy on the environment and Ukraine. Chancellor Merz had drawn an explicit link between the AfD and Russia in a press conference, noting that "2,500 km in the east, the election results were being celebrated." This reflected growing pressure within the CDU and the coalition's Social Democratic partner for Merz to take a harder line on Moscow. The German government had waited a month after a drone attack on Leipzig airport in August before publicly blaming Russia, though when it did, the language was unambiguous: "We are not at war, but we are a daily target of hybrid warfare." With federal or presidential elections scheduled across Spain, France, Italy, Poland, and Germany over the next two years, the AfD's landslide appeared as both a warning and a test of whether Europe's mainstream could find answers. Political scientists pointed to a common diagnosis: the far right's ideas had been steadily normalized by media and political elites, who had ceded the immigration debate entirely and were left only to react. As one correspondent noted, repurposing populist rhetoric—as the UK government had attempted with Reform—did not persuade disaffected voters. The real failure, analysts argued, lay in mainstream parties' inability to develop inspiring policies that addressed the concrete reasons people turned to the far right in the first place.