“Everything is Possible,” declares the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far-right party sending shockwaves across Germany and farther afield, after winning 43.8% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, a state of around two million people in the eastern part of the country. Like other populist movements that have dominated politics over the last decade, the AfD has not hidden its light under a bushel. It’s all there in black and white.
At the start of its election campaign in Saxony Anhalt, the AfD published a 258-page manifesto bearing its motto: “Das Land Zuerst,” or “The Country First.” The manifesto promises large scale deportations of immigrants, including naturalized German citizens, under its remigration program, particularly targeting those who do not look or sound “German.” It seeks to change the history curriculum in schools to teach “more Bismarck and less Hitler,” emphasizing imperial achievements and national power while diminishing Germany’s postwar culture of remembrance and attention paid to Nazism and the Holocaust.
The manifesto promises to support “normal” heterosexual families and conventional households while withholding benefits and legal recognition from LGBTQ families and others it considers “deviant.” It aggressively opposes German military aid to Ukraine and insists that restoring friendly relations with Russia would provide cheaper access to energy and lower prices for Germans. The far right party’s manifesto is worth reading in full. It is no wonder that Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified the AfD chapters in Saxony Anhalt and a neighboring state as right-wing extremist. Yet it is worth admitting that a large number of Germans are finding this vision enticing.
The AfD’s sweeping, simplistic promises offer a beguiling contrast with the gray incrementalism of politics as practiced by a succession of coalition governments in Berlin— a politics of hard truths and achingly slow progress, when there is any progress at all. Why vote for parties synonymous with budget cuts to balance the books, job losses amid fierce competition from China, and billions spent on rearmament when you can return to the secure world of yesteryear?
The AfD won voters away from all its mainstream rivals, winning over 82,000 voters who had previously supported the governing Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU). But one of the more striking consequences of the Sept. 6 election in Saxony-Anhalt was that the AfD energized people who had stopped voting, and brought 170,000 of them—around a tenth of the local electorate—back to the ballot box. These are people who had largely given up on politics, and who, for years, have inhabited a parallel universe. Many of these voters regard Germany’s Nazi past as overblown and refuse to draw parallels between then and now. They also see centrist politics as the instrument of a deep state seeking to undermine their values.
While reporting from Saxony-Anhalt, I was reminded of a small incident I witnessed before the pandemic. I was walking along a street in Leipzig, one of the main cities of the former Communist East Germany, with a helpful contact, an intelligent local activist who had once worked for the Greens. As we passed the offices of MDR, the regional public broadcaster, she suddenly shouted, without provocation, “Lügenpresse”—“lying press,” or “fake news.” Startled, I asked what the station had done to earn her ire. “They don’t listen to the likes of me,” was all she could say. The more I pressed her to identify the specific source of her grievance, the more agitated she became.
Some of what is happening in German politics is particular to this country, not least the long-held resentment among many eastern Germans, whether real or perceived, at having been treated as second-class citizens since reunification in 1990. But much of it belongs to a broader far-right insurgency across Europe, the United States and beyond.
The victorious AfD candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund is a 35-year-old former fragrance salesman who ran a charismatic, brilliantly executed campaign. He has made clear that President Donald Trump is his “model.” In both policy and communications strategy, the AfD is one of MAGA’s closest international allies. Even as the U.S. war in Iran sent oil prices soaring and strained German household budgets, the AfD, unlike other political parties in Europe, did not distance itself from the Trump Administration.
That will not have gone unnoticed by Trump, whose National Security Strategy of Nov. 2025 promised to support “patriotic” movements across Europe to help prevent what it called “civilizational erasure.” In his first reaction to the election result, President Trump refrained from mentioning the AfD by name but declared: “Wow, the populist party in Germany had a really big night.” He ended his post with ‘MGGA!!!’—apparently shorthand for “Make Germany Great Again.”
Trump is not the AfD’s only friend in high places. The party makes no secret of its warmth toward Vladimir Putin, echoing the Russian president’s positions on Ukraine and much else besides. It calls for immediate “peace” negotiations, pretty much on the Kremlin’s terms. Bringing Russia back into the heart of Europe, the party believes, would help advance its socially conservative agenda, restore a constant flow of cheap oil and gas, and provide stability.
There is still a big question mark attached to all of this. The German constitution, created after World War II, requires political parties to build coalitions at both the federal and regional levels. The intention has always been to prevent the accumulation of power in a single party’s hands. That the AfD came tantalizingly close to an overall majority in Saxony-Anhalt—falling just three seats short in the 83-seat regional parliament—is remarkable in itself.
Now Siegmund, the AfD leader, who made much of motorbike rides and other colorful campaign-trial outings, faces the hard graft of trying to form a government. To do so, he must either persuade one of the other parties to cut a deal or entice a few maverick lawmakers to defect. None of this will be easy, not least because of the so-called “firewall”: the refusal of the mainstream parties to work with the AfD so far. That resolve is ebbing, but it may yet hold this time, just barely. These machinations are likely to go down to the wire before the legislature convenes in early October. If Siegmund does become state premier, he has vowed not to dilute the AfD’s core policies to get legislation through.
The task confronting Siegmund and the AfD is considerably more exciting than the one facing Germany’s mainstream parties. The characteristics that defined postwar German politics—compromise and consensus—were regarded for decades as virtues. Many voters now see them as vices. And social media has only intensified the demand for instant, painless answers to all the many problems the country and the world are facing.
Delivering his annual budget speech on Sept. 9, Chancellor Friedrich Merz cut a forlorn figure. His leadership is in grave danger. With two more regional elections looming in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, another eastern state, and Berlin, his Christian Democrats are bracing for a drubbing.
A naturally acerbic figure, Merz has endured historically low poll ratings for months. Much of the German media treats him with derision, dwelling on campaign promises that have backfired and come to haunt him. He boasted that he would halve the AfD’s support, only to watch it double. He also pledged an “autumn of reforms”—by which he meant the autumn of 2025—but those measures are still struggling to make their way through Parliament.
Merz spent years angling for the top job, criticizing his predecessor, Angela Merkel, for dragging the party too far toward the political center, for being too generous to welfare claimants and too welcoming to migrants. He insisted that Germans needed the option of a more genuine conservatism. They have taken him up on the offer, but not of his variety. Some within the CDU wonder whether their party can survive the onslaught from its right.
And it’s not just Merz’s party that’s in the doldrums. The Social Democrats (SPD), the center-left junior partner in the ruling coalition, are also in disarray, their vote share in freefall. Party activists believe the solution lies in a return to the left’s more traditional program of state intervention. Meanwhile, CDU activists want the government to cut spending more deeply and crack down harder on migration. The two parties are pulling in opposite directions, even as governing together requires them to find ways of working together every day.
With Moscow and Washington egging on the AfD, the greatest danger to Germany may lie in its foreign and security policy. Merz may have struggled with his domestic agenda, but he has shown courage and resolve in overhauling Germany’s military posture. Defense spending is on course to meet NATO's target of 3.5% by 2029, an impressive achievement in a country that, only a few years ago, was barely hitting 1%. He has been outspoken in support for Ukraine and recently accused Russia for being behind an attempted drone attack at Leipzig airport.
The approach is replete with risk, as a still shell-shocked chancellor admitted shortly after the results in Saxony-Anhalt. Exactly 57.7% of voters in that state, he admitted, backed parties “that question our unstinting support for Ukraine.” Yet he added that he would “not deviate from his position one millimeter.” In Parliament, Merz accused the AfD of a “grotesque” embrace of Moscow and of “contempt for democratic institutions.”
While Merz struggled to be heard and struggled to sound optimistic, Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the AfD, dominated proceedings. Mocking “the public sector and the asylum industry” as the only growing parts of the German economy, she boasted that her party had “pulverized” all those that had stood in its way. It was a tour de force of fury. And there will be more to come in the dark weeks and months ahead.
