AfD on course for first sole state government in Germany

On 6 September, voters in Saxony-Anhalt will almost certainly deliver the strongest electoral result the far right has achieved in any German state election since the founding of the Federal Republic. Opinion surveys place the Alternative für Deutschland above 40 percent, roughly twice the share trailing the governing Christian Democrats on 23. The Left party, which once dominated eastern German politics, has fallen to 13. The Social Democrats may not even clear the 5 percent barrier required to enter the state parliament.

The mathematics are stark. Should only three or four parties win seats, and should no viable coalition of mainstream parties reach a majority, the AfD would be positioned to govern alone. That outcome would place a party with openly extremist factions in charge of a German federal state for the first time since 1945, with direct authority over policing, the judiciary, schools and cultural institutions.

What an AfD state government would control

German federalism gives state governments substantial independent authority. In Saxony-Anhalt, a governing party or coalition sets policy for the state police force, appoints judges and prosecutors, determines school curricula and controls funding for museums, memorials and cultural bodies. The AfD has made no secret of what it intends to do with these levers. Party documents and statements from its more radical faction call for a fundamental reorientation of education policy, placing greater emphasis on what the party regards as the achievements of German national history and reducing the prominence given to the crimes of the Nazi era. Memorial sites commemorating Nazi victims would face funding cuts.

Policing and judicial appointments carry their own implications. A party that has designated parts of itself as extremist by the domestic intelligence service would gain operational authority over the very agencies tasked with monitoring extremism. The potential for institutional conflict, and for the erosion of independent oversight, is considerable.

A state assembled from fragments

Saxony-Anhalt has never possessed the clear regional identity of Bavaria or Saxony. Its territory was assembled from disparate Prussian lands after the dissolution of Prussia in 1947, abolished during the socialist German Democratic Republic, then re-established at reunification in 1990. It carries an extraordinary cultural inheritance: Martin Luther, George Frideric Händel and Friedrich Nietzsche all lived and worked there. The Bauhaus movement was born in Dessau. Yet the state has long struggled to translate that heritage into a coherent sense of itself.

That fragility of identity has made the state more susceptible to the politics of grievance. When the population feels itself overlooked by Berlin and by western Germany more broadly, the absence of a strong counter-narrative rooted in regional pride leaves space for the AfD's nationalist messaging to fill the void.

The economic catastrophe of the 1990s

The roots of this election result reach back 35 years. At reunification, Saxony-Anhalt was home to almost three million people and carried genuine optimism about the future. What followed instead was devastation. The Treuhandanstalt, the agency charged with privatising East German state-owned enterprises, moved rapidly to sell off or close socialist-era combines that it deemed uncompetitive in a market economy. The shock was immediate and severe. During the spring of 1991, hundreds of thousands of workers in the metalworking and chemical industries of southern Saxony-Anhalt lost their jobs. Whole towns saw their economic reason for existence disappear in months.

The then chancellor, Helmut Kohl, had promised eastern Germans that they would see prosperity bloom. What they got instead was industrial dismantling, mass unemployment and sustained outmigration. Younger and better-qualified residents, women especially, left for western German cities. The population fell from nearly three million to roughly 2.2 million today. Those who remained faced shrinking public services: schools closed, hospitals consolidated, courts and police stations relocated to larger centres. The democratic parties that might have represented these communities became, in the words of one analyst, increasingly invisible in the areas that needed them most.

Marcus Böick, an assistant professor in modern German history at the University of Cambridge who grew up in the Saxony-Anhalt town of Aschersleben, has described how the sense of abandonment became visceral long before the AfD existed. In 2004, he watched a crowd gather on his hometown's renovated market square to protest welfare reforms introduced by Gerhard Schröder's coalition. The anger bewildered him then. Two decades later, returning to the region for a friend's birthday celebration in Hettstedt, he found that his friend's mother had forbidden political discussion at the table, afraid that visiting guests would be disturbed by how openly extremist views were now voiced.

The Federal Statistical Office of Germany records persistent gaps between east and west that reinforce this alienation. On average, eastern Germans remain considerably poorer. They hold less wealth, receive smaller inheritances and face weaker career prospects. The gap has narrowed only slowly since the 1990s and in some measures has barely closed at all. A sense of being treated as second-class citizens has become entrenched across generations, including among those born long after the Wall fell.

From town squares to WhatsApp groups

The mechanisms of political mobilisation have changed as dramatically as the economics. Where discontent once gathered on market squares with hand-painted placards, it now circulates through WhatsApp chains, social media feeds and local networks organised around football clubs and neighbourhood pubs. The AfD has proved adept at building these channels. Its local representatives are often the only politicians visible in small towns that mainstream parties have effectively abandoned. When the state withdraws and established parties retreat, the party that fills the vacuum gains loyalty that is hard to dislodge.

The party's messaging also benefits from a paradox that its opponents have struggled to address. The AfD campaigns on resentment against Berlin and against western German condescension, yet it promises to restore a national greatness that eastern Germans, in the AfD's own telling, were denied. The contradiction between these positions, between grievance and pride, between anger at exclusion and a claim to represent the true nation, has not cost the party support. If anything, it has strengthened it.

The contradictions in the AfD platform

The difficulty for Saxony-Anhalt is that the AfD's promises, should it gain power, are likely to compound the problems it claims to solve. The state faces a shortage of skilled workers that threatens hospitals, businesses and public services. The AfD's signature policy of large-scale remigration, the forced return of immigrants to their countries of origin, directly conflicts with the need to attract and retain the labour force that the local economy requires. Employers in Saxony-Anhalt already struggle to fill vacancies. Removing a portion of the existing workforce, and signalling to potential arrivals that they are unwelcome, would make the shortage worse.

There is a further contradiction. The AfD draws support from nostalgia for an idealised past, whether that past is the German Democratic Republic or an imagined version of pre-1914 Germany. Neither nostalgia offers a plausible basis for governing a state that needs investment, infrastructure and integration into a European economy. As Böick has observed, the party's programme amounts to what Otto von Bismarck is said to have described as suicide prompted by the fear of death.

The firewall under pressure

German politics has operated since 1945 on the principle that parties of the far right must be excluded from government at every level, a convention widely referred to as the firewall. That principle has held in the Bundestag and in every state parliament. Saxony-Anhalt's election could breach it. The mainstream parties, stranded on the other side of that barrier, would face a choice between accepting opposition status for an entire legislative period or breaking a consensus that has defined the republic for eight decades.

The Eurostat database on regional economic disparities documents the structural conditions that have brought German politics to this point. Eastern German regions consistently rank below western ones on income, productivity and employment measures. The convergence that was promised at reunification has remained incomplete, and in some respects has stalled entirely. The political consequences of that failure are now arriving with considerable force.