Though AfD voters often tell pollsters they are struggling economically, their vote takes the form not of socialist nostalgia but of resentment against the undeserving poor. Sociologist Oliver Nachtwey has examined many Germans’ sense of feeling that social mobility is blocked—or better, they have to race ever faster just to keep their existing position. It resembles the pattern explained by Arlie Hochschild, when, faced with the broken promise of the American Dream, resentment is directed against those accused of “cutting in line”—immigrants and minorities—and the elites said to favor them.

This is also why it’s exaggerated to think that the AfD’s appeal to blue-collar workers owes to the marginal welfarist elements of its program. Its appeal lies elsewhere, and in the broader cultural shift represented by the chanting of Ausländer raus! (“Foreigners out!”) at nightclubs, at football matches, and even at a tennis club in the poshest part of western Berlin. It offers a grim frisson of rebellion: because it is shocking, because it humiliates migrants, and because it annoys fellow citizens who think their openminded values or credentials matter. Dressed up in irony, the chant is proud, defiant, and exuberantly antagonistic to the political left.

The AfD’s ideas aren’t new, yet it benefits from deep-seated hostility toward mainstream politics and media, and alienation from the social compromise on which the major postwar parties built support. Given that in the 1990s and 2000s most Ossis did apparently want to join this compromise, routinely voting for the SPD and CDU, any explanation of AfD support has to focus on the failures of this promise. Yet this story isn’t only about the east. For reunification had its fallout in the west, too, wrapped up with the model of work and welfare that Germany adopted in the era of globalization and the Eurozone.

The labor reforms pioneered by the establishment center-left, and the wider pressure on lower-income Germans’ wages, rents, and fuel bills, did not directly push them toward the AfD. In the 2000s, the left was the main electoral beneficiary, with the formation of Die Linke by disappointed Social Democrats and post-Communists in 2007. This party’s opposition to SPD-led labor reforms made it a sizable force in this period, and helped to make these issues central to national political debate. It thrived in many of the regions where the AfD is today strongest.

Yet in the post-2008-crisis period its challenge wilted. Like many left-populist forces around Europe, it represented an uneasy alliance between parts of an old Communist party, trade unionists, and a more movementist wing; it could not displace the center-left, and often became its junior partner in state governments. More socially conservative, older parts of its base—including in eastern states, where it had a more gradualist outlook—also jarred with its more radical elements. This would eventually produce a long and messy split, culminating in 2023 with the departure of leading figure Sahra Wagenknecht. Die Linke seemed to have missed its chance to capitalize on voters’ alienation from the major parties.

In Lichtenberg, the part of eastern Berlin where my partner and I live, forecasts for the 2025 federal election promised easy victory for the AfD’s Beatrix von Storch. The aristocratic Von Storch is a granddaughter of Adolf Hitler’s finance minister; her main opponent here was Die Linke’s Ines Schwerdtner, my former Jacobin colleague. This is a relatively low-income district, with privatized GDR-era housing blocks and semidetached starter homes built where public amenities used to be; it has less of a reputation of harboring neo-Nazis than neighboring Marzahn and has long elected leftist or SPD representatives. Yet the AfD has made huge gains here and its supporters no longer conceal their views.

Yet Schwerdtner emerged the winner—and around the German capital the party gained a new lease on life. If the 2025 election looked like the death-knell for Die Linke, instead it electrified the party, whose willingness to confront both the AfD and Olaf Scholz’s center-left government helped it to rally first-time voters and a wave of new members. This Sunday, Die Linke made a further breakthrough as it won Berlin’s state election for the first time, taking 26 percent support thanks to a campaign focused on rents and the cost of living. In my corner of Berlin, both Die Linke and the AfD rose sharply, with the left-wing party ahead by 30 points to 23.

This result was not gifted to Die Linke by demographic destiny. In this vote it scored around 50 percent among young women and in some of Berlin’s most diverse areas—yet these were new developments in city politics. In fact, while some post-election reactions cast the capital as inherently woke, its politics are not consistently left-wing: The outgoing mayor was a conservative; in most recent Berlin elections, even the combined forces of Die Linke, Greens, and Social Democrats are only around half the electorate. Die Linke’s success owed to hard work knocking on doors, resisting the AfD’s identity politics but also focusing squarely on cost-of-living issues.

This also means speaking to different kinds of voters. As Loren Balhorn pointed out on France24, the left had already scored similar vote shares in Berlin back in the 1990s, but with a difference: It has now emerged from its elderly, post-Communist, more eastern niche to rally a more diverse base more representative of Berliners in general. What’s less clear is if it can do the same elsewhere.

In Berlin, rents have in the last decade become a central issue, which most voters cite among their reasons for picking Die Linke. Yet, while just over half of Germans rent their homes, the housing issue—and the call for the state to buy back privatized housing stock from big landlords—is not everywhere the natural focus of pocketbook politics. Moreover, while Die Linke has also built its ground game outside Berlin, notably in Leipzig, this picture is patchy overall. The party can today again claim around 12 percent of the vote nationally, and has attracted other progressive voters since last year’s federal election. Winning back AfD voters will be much harder.

Calls for an “anti-fascist economics” (Isabella Weber) or a populist-spirited “alternative to the Alternative” (Adam Tooze) push in the right direction. Such calls do not preach despair or commitment to a declining status quo but propose to defeat the AfD by mobilizing voters for something better. In this sense, essentializing the AfD as a voice for eastern grievances both exaggerates its strength and overlooks the danger it poses: both because most easterners don’t support this party, and because this analysis ignores the AfD’s rise in the west. The growth of resentful nationalism is not a regional quirk but a global trend across Europe, India, and the Americas: There was no reason to expect that the Federal Republic was uniquely immune.

The AfD is not yet at the gates of power, and even in its strongest states it doesn’t have the majorities to rule alone. Yet it seems unlikely that mainstream parties can keep getting their own voters to turn out—expecting them to swallow higher living costs, a later retirement age, and more medical bills—simply by warning that the AfD is worse. This is the approach Merz proposed in his televised response to Sunday evening’s vote, as he promised to push on with his “reforms.” The risk is that the far right ends up looking like the only non–status quo option. In Berlin, at least, there’s some hope of showing another way forward.