Bluesky

The beaming face of Alice Weidel, a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), only deepened the humiliation. Election results in Saxony-Anhalt, a small eastern German state, blindsided Germany. The AfD—widely regarded as an extremist party—took nearly 44 percent of the vote. It doubled its previous share amid record-high turnout, achieving a vote share unmatched by any German party today. Although the party fell narrowly short of a majority of seats, it will assume control of the state government, either in a minority government or with a small populist party as a partner. This is a political megaquake. For the first time in the Federal Republic’s 80-year history, an extreme-right party will not just participate in government but lead it.

Clearly shaken by his party’s worst showing ever in the east, Germany’s Christian Democratic (CDU) chancellor, Friedrich Merz, stammered: “Yesterday’s result has changed not only Saxony-Anhalt, but Germany as a whole. We are all profoundly shocked. We did not expect it to turn out like this.” Weidel didn’t expect such a landslide either, calling the “sensational” vote a vindication: Voters themselves, she crowed, rejected the AfD’s ostracization through a “firewall” that excluded it from coalitions. Now the AfD can and will go it (virtually) alone. For Weidel and her team, the victory couldn’t be sweeter—and the future brighter.

Of course, the obvious scapegoat for this abysmal failure is Merz and his conservative–social democratic government. The Berlin coalition is unpopular, as is Merz as a leader. The CDU, which had ruled in Saxony-Anhalt for 24 years, had its 2021 outcome cut by more than half on Sunday. This backlash is exactly what Merz’s CDU had coming by mimicking the AfD’s anti-immigration jingoism and thus promoting this red herring to pride of place and spending much of its first year in office obsessively tightening migration. A raft of restrictions cut migration numbers, but not nearly as radically as the CDU promised or the AfD wants.

German conservatives paid the same price that other conservative parties around Europe have. As in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, and Austria, voters went for the real thing rather than the copy. The traditional conservative parties lost out (France’s Les Républicains disappeared completely from the political landscape) as the far-right parties there surged. The writing was on the wall, and Germany’s conservatives failed to read it. Polling had the AfD at or above 40 percent but the horror of this was just too great for the establishment to digest. It might have been in denial—or, just as likely, simply so clueless as to a strategy to counteract it that they tried to wish it away.

But Merz alone is not responsible for this debacle, and it is not entirely an eastern German phenomenon either, even if in the western states the AfD polls at about half that in the east. The explanation for the east’s enthusiastic attraction to the far right reaches back to another Christian Democrat leader: Helmut Kohl, the “father of unification.” When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Kohl government put the country’s unification on fast-forward, completing this feat in just 11 months and promising easterners roses if they obediently followed along. The Federal Republic annexed eastern Germany, imposing its entire legal code on its new 16 million citizens—something they did not contest. Nor did they contest the overnight conversion to the deutschemark or the sell-off of the former communist state’s enterprises to the highest bidder—western Germans, of course. The east’s industries went under, the cream of its labor force headed to western Germany, and the five new eastern states were left to wallow in sky-high unemployment and economic stagnation for more than a decade. Saxony-Anhalt was hit particularly hard by emigration and demographic decline: It has 28 percent fewer people than in 1990. Its per capita GDP is a third less than the western German average—although most people beyond Germany wouldn’t complain about a 38,452 euros per capita GDP, higher than in Japan or South Korea.

Eastern Germans—in Saxony-Anhalt and beyond—are not suffering extreme hardship as they did in the 1990s, and their attraction to the AfD is not a pauper’s uprising. Nor does its meager number of “people with a migration background”—just a third of the national average—explain why the AfD’s radical anti-migration policies strike a chord. It’s not a lack of investment in physical infrastructure either, as the German state has spent nearly 1 trillion euros on the likes of highways, waterways, and railroads since unification.

The deeper explanation is twofold. First, the east is still captive to the authoritarian mindset of the fallen communist state, even if younger generations didn’t experience it. The German Democratic Republic, or GDR, was a police state that could only rule with a massive, Orwellian security apparatus behind it—watch the film The Lives of Others to get a sense of this. The top-down, narrow-minded, arch-conservative ethic of East German communism is alive and well in younger eastern Germans, who vote very much like their parents; the AfD’s support was remarkably consistent across nearly all age groups. Professional surveys, such as the Leipzig Authoritarianism Study, show easterners articulate twice as much anti-Muslim sentiment, almost three times the xenophobia, and are twice as convinced that Germany is being “swamped with foreigners.” These are damning numbers that illustrate that the AfD’s popularity is not just a vague “protest vote”—although it is that, too—but the expression of a deep-seated racism that has been handed down from generation to generation.

Second, the Kohl government’s annexation romp disserved eastern Germans by relieving them of agency in formulating a new Germany. The German elites of the day dismissed the idea of a constitutional convention in which eastern and western Germans would together rethink and remake Germany. This might have contained some of the progressive elements of the short-lived, non-communist, democratic GDR’s constitution, which included rights to work and to housing, instruments for direct citizen participation designed to supplement representative democracy, and protections against state overreach. Instead, eastern Germans were treated as second-class citizens—the class dunces—which is exactly how they feel, and one big reason they reject Germany’s political structures.

So, what next? There’s the hope that the AfD will wither when its policies fail to materialize, as most of their maximalist promises surely will. But it can do serious damage in the state by censoring school textbooks, directing police, instructing prosecutors and the domestic intelligence service, and setting a general tone of intolerance. Now they have a taller soapbox than ever to make their points and show their substance.

Moreover, later this month, voters will cast ballots in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. In both states, the AfD is polling twice as high as it scored in the previous elections (although in Berlin this is “just” 18 percent). The far right is almost certain to rack up record numbers, and in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, those figures will likely approach those of Saxony-Anhalt’s.

Germany’s political parties are in shock and mouthing platitudes. There is despair in the air rather any sign of serious reckoning. Merz’s own response was notably not to propose a dramatic new anti-AfD strategy, but to fix communication—and go full-speed ahead on limiting migration, despite 1.8 million total vacancies across the economy and over 100,000 unfilled apprenticeship positions. God forbid that politicians actually argue that Germany benefits hugely from migration.

While some on the left advocate banning the AfD, that window has closed. The remaining option is an all-for-one democratic coalition. In Saxony-Anhalt, the combined seats of the CDU, the Social Democrats, the Greens, and Die Linke equal those of the AfD. With the toleration or ad hoc support of the BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance), they could form a minority government. But the CDU refuses to partner with Die Linke; indeed, many CDU members would join an AfD government before one with the democratic socialists.

The AfD’s fans across Europe and beyond are gloating with Weidel: Elon Musk posted “Gut gemacht!” (“Well done!”), and Hungary’s deposed strongman Viktor Orbán congratulated the AfD on a “huge night for Germany and Europe.” It was huge, and it reflects a political elite profoundly out of touch with its voters—and reality.