When voters in Saxony-Anhalt go to the polls on Sunday, they may deliver the strongest result for a far-right party in post-war German history. Polls put the Alternative for Germany (AfD) above 40%, some 15 to 20 points ahead of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) that currently governs the state. Whether that translates into actual power is a different question entirely.
A result without a government
The arithmetic is straightforward; the politics are not. Even if the AfD wins the largest share of the vote, every other party represented in the state parliament has ruled out forming a coalition with it. That means the CDU, currently led by state premier Sven Schulze, could continue governing in coalition with smaller parties, depending on how the seat distribution falls. The AfD would hold the most seats but find itself locked out of the executive.
This is the firewall that mainstream German parties have maintained since the AfD entered parliament a decade ago. It has held at the federal level and in every state so far. But the dynamic is becoming harder to sustain as the AfD's vote share grows. A party with more than 40% of the vote sitting in opposition while a coalition of parties with a combined share well below that governs is a situation that tests the credibility of representative politics, whatever one thinks of the AfD itself.
Schulze has framed the election in dramatic terms, calling it "a decision that will set the course for Germany." That is the language of a politician who knows his party is likely to lose the popular vote and is trying to reframe the contest as something broader than a verdict on his own record.
The economic paradox
The standard explanation for the AfD's strength in eastern Germany runs something like this: economic decline, deindustrialisation, and a sense of being left behind by the west. Saxony-Anhalt fits part of that template. Unemployment runs at around 8%, well above the national average. The state is heavily rural. Per-capita income trails western German states by a wide margin.
But the economic story is more complicated than the narrative of decline suggests. Thomas Brockmeier, who heads the Halle-Dessau Chamber of Industry and Commerce, points out that over the past decade and a half, the state has done reasonably well by its own historical standards. New industrial sectors, including logistics and renewable energy, have taken root. Investment has arrived. The state has not been standing still.
If the economy is not catastrophically failing, why is the AfD polling at 40%? The answer appears to lie less in material deprivation than in cultural grievance. Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD's top candidate, has campaigned on what he calls "culturally alien" immigrants, leftist teachers, gender ideology, and the cost to German industry of losing access to cheap Russian oil and gas through support for Ukraine. These are not the priorities of a constituency that is primarily worried about pay packets. They are the priorities of a constituency that feels its values are under assault from Berlin and Brussels.
Siegmund's campaign of provocation
Siegmund is not a typical politician. A practised social media operator, he has turned provocation into a campaign strategy. When Der Spiegel, Germany's most influential news magazine, dubbed him "Germany's most dangerous man" in a cover story last month, Siegmund posted footage of himself signing the magazine cover on Instagram. He called it "good advertising."
The incident illustrates something important about how the AfD operates. Outrage from mainstream media institutions does not damage the party with its supporters. It confirms their suspicion that the establishment is united against them. Every condemnation becomes a recruiting tool. Siegmund understands this instinctively, and his campaign has been designed to generate the maximum volume of establishment condemnation.
His policy promises are equally confrontational. He has said he would recruit politically sympathetic officials from other states to staff an AfD government, promising clashes with federal authorities over schools, law enforcement, and asylum centres. This is not a programme of quiet administration. It is a programme of institutional disruption.
What an AfD interior minister would mean
State governments in Germany hold real power. They control education, culture, and domestic security. They also sit in the Bundesrat, the upper house of parliament, where they vote on federal legislation. An AfD-led state would be a permanent complication for Chancellor Friedrich Merz's government in Berlin, able to block or delay legislation that requires Bundesrat approval.
The security implications worry other parties more than the legislative ones. The interior minister of a German state controls the state police and has access to sensitive federal security information. The SPD interior minister of neighbouring Thuringia warned this week that an AfD state interior minister would be "a flagrant security risk for the Federal Republic" because of the possibility of security information leaking to extremist groups.
That warning reflects a genuine dilemma. The AfD is classified by the domestic intelligence service as a suspected right-wing extremist organisation in several states, though not yet at the federal level. Putting a politician from such a party in charge of a state police force and its intelligence apparatus would, at minimum, create an unprecedented tension within Germany's federal security architecture.
The consensus model under strain
Janos Richter, an analyst with the Verfassungsblog, a public law forum, has described the situation plainly: "The consensus-driven model we have been used to within Germany over the last decades is now threatened." He is right, and not only because of the AfD. Germany's political system depends on a culture of compromise, on the assumption that parties with different views can find common ground in coalition negotiations. When one party is excluded from those negotiations entirely, and when that party commands the support of more than 40% of voters, the system bends.
The question is whether it breaks. Sunday's election will not answer that definitively. The firewall will almost certainly hold in the sense that the AfD will not enter government in Saxony-Anhalt, regardless of the result. But each time the AfD wins a larger share of the vote without gaining power, the pressure on the firewall increases. At some point, the argument that a party with 40% support should be excluded from governing becomes difficult to sustain in a democracy, even one with good reasons for that exclusion.
East, west, and the road to 2029
The AfD's strength is concentrated in the east, but it is no longer only an eastern phenomenon. Earlier this year, the party scored around 20% in elections in the western states of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. That is not enough to govern, but it is enough to shift the political centre of gravity in those states and to show that the party's appeal extends well beyond the former German Democratic Republic.
Saxony-Anhalt is the first of three state elections this month. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin follow. The AfD is likely to perform strongly in the northeastern state; Berlin is less certain but not impossible. Each result will be read as a signal about the party's trajectory toward the 2029 federal election, which the AfD has explicitly identified as its next national target.
For Merz, whose government is already navigating difficult economic terrain, the prospect of AfD gains in the Bundesrat is a serious legislative headache. For the European Union, a far-right party with governing experience at state level in the bloc's largest member state would be a new kind of challenge, one that goes beyond the parliamentary delegations the AfD already sends to Brussels and Strasbourg.
People mentioned
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Thomas Brockmeier
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Janos Richter
Organisations
Alternative for Germany (AfD) · Christian Democratic Union (CDU) · Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)
