Tuesday briefing: Why the far right’s success in German state elections can’t be written off as a local phenomenon any more

Good morning. For the first time since the second world war, a far-right party has won a regional election in Germany. As well as finishing first in Thuringia, where it won nearly 33% of the vote, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) finished second in Saxony, with 31% – and it did so with none of the normalisation strategy that similar parties have deployed in France or Italy. Instead, the AfD uses Nazi slogans and calls the Berlin Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame”.
While the AfD demanded to be included in coalition negotiations in both states yesterday, a “firewall” designed to keep the party out of government is likely to hold for the foreseeable future. Even so, its success is undoubtedly a seismic moment in German politics. For today’s newsletter, I spoke to the Guardian’s Berlin correspondent Deborah Cole about how the AFD did it, and whether this is a regional phenomenon or a signpost to something larger. Here are the headlines.
News of the AfD’s success was “all-consuming” in Germany on Monday, Deborah Cole said – with the subplot of success for an upstart populist party on the left, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), providing little consolation for the mainstream parties.
The three parties in chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unpopular government, including his own centre-left Social Democrats, each received less than 10% of the vote. “Despite the fact that we’ve known all year that this election would probably look exactly like this, there is a feeling of a political earthquake,” Deborah said. “It has sent aftershocks through the country, and everyone is grappling with the consequences.”
The state elections in which the AfD has enjoyed such success confer considerable power on the victors. “The postwar constitution designed things to avoid too much power being concentrated in Berlin,” Deborah said. The states have power over areas ranging from education to policing and health care – but the regional elections are also a barometer of the wider political mood.
“In the past, there have often been attempts to dismiss strong performances at the state level as protest votes or being based on hyper-regional issues,” Deborah said. “But these two elections represent about 10% of the German population. We are out of the territory of dismissing this as a protest. For many voters now, the AfD really is their party. They have pledged their allegiance.”
How strong are the AfD?
While many parties on the far right begin on the fringes and then seek to make themselves more acceptable to the mainstream, the story of the AfD’s rise follows a very different path.
“People like Marine Le Pen [in France] and Giorgia Meloni [in Italy] have tried to put a bourgeois face on their politics,” Deborah said. “The AfD has dispensed with that. They started out as a little grouping of Eurosceptic economics professors, critical of European bailouts and feeling that Germany shouldn’t have to pay the bill for what they saw as profligate southern European countries. It was more about the euro than migration.”
But in the 11 years since its founding in 2013, the party has only become more radical with each change in leadership, with anxieties over Angela Merkel’s commitment to help refugees arriving from Syria in 2015 just one rung on the ladder. Deborah points to Björn Höcke (main picture), its leader in Thuringia, whom she recently heard speak in the state capital of Erfurt, and who is central to its radical anti-migrant, anti-Islam message.
“He has directly targeted Germany’s culture of remembrance and atonement for the Holocaust,” she said. “It’s hard to overstate how shocking that is to many Germans.” Another former AfD leader has previously dismissed the Third Reich as “no more than a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful history”.
“The scary thing is that the most successful chapters of the party are also the ones that are under observation from the German constitutional authorities and designated as rightwing extremists,” Deborah said. “Their hostility to the mainstream makes them quite thrilling to some voters, particularly in the east. So there is no obvious incentive for them to tack towards the centre.”
Who are the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance?
The other big winner on Sunday night was the BSW, which was founded only last year when Wagenknecht (above), a charismatic firebrand in hard-left politics since the 1990s, broke away from the existing Die Linke party. Her eponymous party finished third in both Thuringia and Saxony, and is now likely to form a part of any coalition government.
“The party’s name underlines how much this is a one-woman show, and she has scrambled the landscape,” Deborah said. “You can’t make light of what her party is calling for. On the one hand, it is left wing on economics, calling for higher taxes on the wealthy, for example. But Wagenknecht has also really struck a chord with views that many see as being pro-Russian, or even pro-Putin: she is strongly critical of military aid to Ukraine, and she wants immediate peace talks – which would cement Russia’s existing gains.”
Foreign affairs are not part of regional coalition negotiations, of course. “But it’s only a year until the general election,” Deborah noted. “The smart money is on the BSW at least being able to capture the five per cent of the national vote which is the hurdle to representation in parliament. So that means she could be a player in national coalition talks.”
Is this just a regional phenomenon?
Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, the east of the country has held a distinct political identity of its own. In this excellent analysis, Philip Oltermann writes: “For years, the assumption in Germany has been that once the eastern states had ‘caught up’ with the rest of the country economically, their political outlook would align.”
Today, though, the AfD is succeeding even as more people migrate from west to east than are going the other way, with eastern states’ economies growing rapidly. “You don’t see the kind of disparity you used to,” Deborah said. “But the impact of the past is still felt. There are still big demographic differences: for example, a lot more women have left than men.”
As early as 2007, Spiegel reported that two thirds of those who had left since 1991 were women, and that the young men who stayed were prime targets for neo-Nazi groups. “A lot of the people with better education and better prospects left too. The AfD have been very good at tapping into a sense of alienation.”
Nonetheless, any attempt to dismiss these elections as a local problem should be treated with caution. “In two weeks’ time, we’ll have elections in Brandenburg [the state surrounding Berlin], and while the Social Democrats will do a bit better, we’re probably going to see similar results. This is not just a phenomenon of the east any more.”
Will the firewall hold?
The mainstream parties have said that they will maintain a brandmauer, or firewall, against the AfD, and refuse to cooperate with them on legislation or include them in coalitions. While the CDU did work with the AfD in Thuringia in 2023 to pass a property tax cut and defeat the minority government, there is little expectation of that norm collapsing now.
“You can more or less guarantee that that will be maintained in the foreseeable future,” Deborah said. “They are too far outside the mainstream. They will not enter any central government coalition.”
But there are ways that policy can work to the benefit of a party that presents itself as an anti-establishment voice. Meanwhile, even if it won’t work with the AfD, the CDU has been shifting rightwards since Angela Merkel’s retirement, in part because of the threat the AfD poses to its vote share.
After a mass stabbing allegedly carried out by a Syrian asylum seeker in the western city of Solingen in August, for example, the CDU demanded that all Afghan and Syrian refugees be stopped at the border before making an asylum claim – in defiance of the German constitution. “Yes, the AfD is going to continue to be excluded from government,” Deborah said. “But there is a strong argument that they are exercising a lot of influence already.”
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