So what leads almost half of voters in Saxony-Anhalt and roughly a third nationwide to support the AfD nonetheless?
Angela Merkel and the AfD’s Name
These voters now come from all sections of society but, unlike the core constituencies of the CDU/CSU and SPD, they are considerably younger. Dismissing them as merely deluded, infantilizing them as stupid victims of a devious social-media strategy or simply regarding them as insane, as former CDU Secretary General Ruprecht Polenz does in his latest book, are at best helpless defensive reactions to a changed reality.
Rather than insulting voters, it might help to examine the political conditions that made the AfD strong. They show that the party is responding to a representation gap created by the established parties themselves. This is especially true of the CDU and CSU, since some of the leading figures in the Eurosceptic professors’ party founded as Alternative für Deutschland in Oberursel, Hesse, in 2013 came from their ranks.
The name Alternative für Deutschland itself was a response to Angela Merkel’s repeated insistence that certain political decisions had no alternative. In that sense, the CDU’s long-serving chancellor quite unintentionally became the inspiration for the name of her political rival.
Although more measured voices within the CDU, such as that of former Saxony-Anhalt Minister-President Reiner Haseloff, warned early on against demonizing the young party, exactly that happened.
Jakob Augstein, publisher of the left-wing weekly Der Freitag, described the AfD in Der Spiegel at the time as a party of illiberal German nationalists and warned that it marked the return of a specter from the past. That set the frame that, in the years that followed, would lead to real radicalization.
An Open Flank on the Radical Right
To this day, the AfD is not a homogeneous party. Throughout its existence, it has been riven by struggles between a liberal-conservative wing and an ethnic-nationalist one. Senior politicians have repeatedly resigned or been expelled over the course of the party’s history.
While moderate AfD members engage in damage control when scandals erupt, the party’s right-wing youth scene openly closes ranks with an old-guard neo-Nazi milieu.
There is also evidence that agitators influenced by the Eurofascism of the French Nouvelle Droite and by anti-democratic intellectuals of the Weimar Republic wield influence within the party.
The party’s intellectual center is a New Right cadre school in rural Saxony-Anhalt that until 2024 was known as the Institute for State Policy. There, adherents enthuse about an ethnic-nationalist German community of destiny and seek to displace National Socialism from Germany’s culture of remembrance.
The institute’s intellectual driving force is publisher Götz Kubitschek, who also sees himself as a mentor and source of ideas for Björn Höcke, the AfD’s leading figure in Thuringia. As early as 2013, Kubitschek openly acknowledged that he wanted to use the newly founded AfD for his own ends. He now says he has succeeded.
Missed Opportunities
Could this have been prevented?
An honest debate would certainly have shown that the backward-looking ideas about state and society advanced there were neither desirable nor capable of solving existing problems. Yet the established parties, together with the media and civil-society actors, decided against such a debate because even then they believed that starving the new political force of attention was the order of the day.
They wanted to “deny the right a platform”, as the phrase went, and had no desire to develop counterarguments to the narratives advanced by its theorists.
Yet there were good reasons to engage substantively with the AfD’s positions at the time. Its concerns about European fiscal policy, after all, were shared by many economists and had been one of the central reasons for the party’s founding.
That did not happen either, allowing the AfD to make criticism of Brussels’s euro rescue policy the first major issue it could claim as its own.
Over the years that followed, more issues were added. First came migration, security and Islamism, intensified by Germany’s open-border policy after 2016. Later came the restrictions on freedom imposed by coronavirus policies, as well as energy, economic, education and social policy.
Migration as the Central Issue
Anyone who followed Ulrich Siegmund’s campaign in Saxony-Anhalt could see that many issues were interconnected and ultimately tied back to migration policy. Whenever problems in schools were discussed, the conversation also turned to violence blamed on Muslim migrants.
When social conditions were raised as a concern, the AfD pointed to the high welfare payments made to immigrants that the wider public has to shoulder.
On security, the party cites the Police Crime Statistics, which show that immigrants from the main countries of origin for asylum seekers are disproportionately represented among suspects in serious violent crime.
Then there is the perennial issue of Islamism, which becomes more urgent with every terrorist attack and stabbing. In fact, all of these issues are causing concern far beyond Saxony-Anhalt.
For years, however, the established parties were reluctant to raise these issues themselves. On the political left, people dreamed of a borderless global society and rejected even the sensible management of immigration as inhumane.
Islamism was downplayed as a consequence of discrimination experienced by an oppressed minority at the hands of a “structurally racist majority society”, while many problems arising from an at least partly dysfunctional migration and integration policy were simply denied.
Anyone in the SPD or the Greens who spoke critically about the rise of Islamism was sidelined or simply ignored. The FDP’s liberals avoided taking a position on these cultural conflicts because they saw their expertise primarily in economic policy.
That left the CDU and CSU, which did have critical voices in their ranks capable of addressing all the problems mentioned. But the overall party line presented to the public was clear: they did not want to articulate a clear alternative to the left-wing vision of a successful multicultural society because they felt responsible for developments resulting from the political course set by Chancellor Angela Merkel. The CDU itself had spearheaded the opening of the borders, the energy transition and the nuclear phaseout, among other policies.
The Representation Gap on Right-Wing Issues
There was another factor. Left-wing actors declared all the problems of a society shaped by immigration, from honor-based violence and clan crime to parallel societies, to be AfD issues. Anyone who addressed them had to put up with being branded right-wing and automatically associated with the AfD.
The result was twofold. First, this led to widespread intimidation of conservative politicians, as well as of ordinary citizens who had doubts about the unrealistically colorful Bullerbü idyll presented to them in the media.
Second, issues capable of winning elections were handed to the AfD on a silver platter. It filled the representation gap left by the established parties. As a result, it surged in the polls and made rapid electoral gains.
Nor did the increasingly obsessive political fight against the right change that, even after a campaign by the NGO Correctiv brought millions of people onto the streets.
What has not been tried in Germany to discredit the AfD and its sympathizers?
Churches excluded AfD members from holding office. Trade unions and cultural and educational institutions are engaged in permanent campaigns against the right, and there is scarcely an NGO, association or municipality that has not joined the Federal Republic’s united front against the right-wing enemy. The less effective this proved, the more questionable the measures deemed legitimate became.
Criticism of the State Branded Anti-Democratic
Former SPD Interior Minister Nancy Faeser announced in February 2024, as part of the fight against the right, that the security authorities would target a whole range of conduct that fell below the threshold of criminal liability and was therefore legal.
She said security agencies would focus on shifting mental boundaries, patterns of thought and language and the delegitimization of the state, all of which would in future be targeted.
This was surprising, because criticism of the state, indeed open criticism of the political system, had long been regarded as a defining feature of the political left. Large sections of the population therefore saw this fundamental reversal within the SPD as a questionable intervention aimed at safeguarding its own hold on power.
The same applies to the creation of reporting centers and new rules targeting vaguely defined speech offenses such as “hate and incitement”. Overall, the fight against the right had been stretched so far that it became increasingly ill-defined and, whenever convenient, could also be turned against the CDU/CSU, the FDP and even the SPD itself.
Redefining Racism
An ever-expanding definition of racism had already been used at universities to target unwelcome positions and was then gradually popularized in the media and across the cultural and educational sectors.
This strategy of shifting definitions first became apparent after the sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015/2016, when even left-wing feminist Alice Schwarzer and Muslim political scientist Bassam Tibi were accused of inciting hatred against migrants because they linked the events to Angela Merkel’s refugee policy.
The result of this narrowing of political debate and a deliberately fostered cancel culture, however, was that the AfD gained yet another issue it could claim as its own: the defense of free speech, one of the pillars of liberal democracy. On this issue, too, the CDU/CSU and FDP failed to convince, although credible advocates of civil liberties within their ranks repeatedly spoke out.
Factional Struggles in the CDU
Those efforts, however, are repeatedly undermined by fellow CDU members. When Daniel Günther, the CDU Minister-President of Schleswig-Holstein, publicly contemplates banning unwelcome media outlets, even on television, he damages the CDU/CSU. The FDP’s credibility is likewise damaged when leading FDP members set up an entire agency that makes money by tracking down online insults against politicians, which are then reported to the authorities in their hundreds.
When Ulrich Siegmund said after his election victory that he would govern only if he did not have to compromise his principles and could keep his promises, he was unmistakably taking aim at Friedrich Merz. During his 2025 election campaign, Merz had promised to close the representation gap on migration and energy policy.
Yet even before he was elected chancellor, he had abandoned almost everything he had wanted to include in his governing program during negotiations with the SPD, the Greens and the Left.
The reckoning was swift. Instead of halving the AfD, as Merz had promised, the AfD halved the CDU in Saxony-Anhalt last weekend. A political earthquake had been foreseeable, but the scale of the CDU’s defeat, with its parliamentary group cut by more than half, probably still came as a surprise.
A Last Chance for the Political Center?
It may sound theatrical to speak of Merz’s chancellorship as a “last chance for the political center”, as German journalist Robin Alexander has done, but the challenges facing political actors will certainly not diminish in future.
Renowned constitutional scholar and former president of the Federal Constitutional Court Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde wrote in 1964 that the liberal constitutional state depended on conditions it could not itself guarantee. If one takes the implicit message of that statement seriously, governing against a large part of the population should be out of the question. Simply carrying on as before should be ruled out as well.
The representation gap shows where action is needed: migration and integration policy, Islamism, the intolerable costs imposed on working people, education and social policy and, of course, internal security.
