Serious About Democracy

Thomas Fazi writes:

The AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday was crushing. The party achieved 43.8% of the vote share, more than double its 2021 result though still short of an absolute majority of seats. But this was a historic election in other respects. At 77.8%, the turnout was the highest the state has recorded since reunification, in a region long synonymous with electoral apathy. The AfD did not merely win over disillusioned Christian Democrats — it brought back voters who had given up on the ballot box altogether.

Now, the real challenge for the AfD begins. Aside from the question of whether the party will be able to form a government or not — and the extraordinary measures being considered by the establishment to prevent a possible AfD state government from exercising its mandate — a larger problem looms. One exit poll found that nearly two-thirds of workers voted for the AfD. When asked what drove their vote, migration came sixth, behind education. Social security topped the list, followed by peace in Europe and the economy. In other words, this was primarily a vote about pensions, wages, energy bills and war — not about migration.

This leaves the AfD with a problem, because its economic programme is poorly equipped to answer any of the problems facing Germany. The party is calling for the tax system to be simplified, and is proposing an income tax schedule with a small number of bands that would provide tax relief for everyone. It wants to increase the basic tax-free allowance while abolishing wealth and inheritance taxes. Corporate taxes are also to be reduced to a “competitive level”. Meanwhile, the AfD has promised higher pensions as well as generous one-off payments for every newborn child.

The problem is how all this would be paid for, especially considering that the AfD wants to retain the constitutional debt brake — the legal rule that limits how much money the government can borrow. Combined with the party’s support for hiking defence spending, it’s hard not to see the contradiction inherent in its economic agenda and why it is likely to lead to further welfare cuts. This contradiction mirrors an internal conflict that has been playing out for a long time. As one German commentator put it, “two camps can be identified within the party programme, representing fundamentally opposing convictions: those who want to restrict the influence of the state and leave the economy to the free market, and those who want to appeal to economically disadvantaged voters through an extensive welfare state.”

It is telling in this regard that the party’s programme for the Saxony-Anhalt election had little to say about socio-economic issues, concentrating on remigration and culture-war symbolism. Promises included defunding the foundations that sustain rival parties’ hinterlands, stripping rainbow flags from public buildings.

This is a contradiction that the party will soon be forced to address. For as long as migration has dominated the debate, economics and welfare were not much of a problem. However, two themes are now clashing. Friedrich Merz has moved sharply Right on migration, narrowing the ground on which the AfD is uniquely positioned. His proposed economic reforms, such as the mooted abolition of the pension at 63 for long-serving workers, have forced questions that the party’s welfare programme avoids addressing. To its credit, the AfD has opposed Merz’s abolition of the pension at 63, but a single defensive position is no replacement for an economic agenda. If the party does not want to squander a mandate of this size, it will have to address its voters’ demand for social and economic security.

And Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a particular kind of political story that the news likes to call a warning. Saxony-Anhalt is not a warning. A warning implies something has not yet happened. This has happened.

Turnout on Sunday reached 77.8 per cent, a record since reunification, up from 60.3 per cent five years ago. Nearly eight in ten adults in a state of two million people walked to a polling station and cast a vote for someone. Of those who voted, 43.8 per cent chose the party that Germany’s political and security establishment has spent a decade trying to fence off from power. The AfD finished first in every one of Saxony-Anhalt’s 218 towns and municipalities. It won 38 of the 41 constituencies outright. Only in Magdeburg and two seats in Halle did tactical voting by the combined left hold the line, and even there the margins tell their own story: in Halle III, Die Linke’s Jannik-Loris Balint scraped home with 39.9 per cent against the AfD’s 17.8, a result that only happened because left-wing voters abandoned their own parties’ colours to stop him losing. 

Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s lead candidate, has sat in the Magdeburg parliament since 2016 and has spent the campaign needling the chancellor by name. On election night he could not resist one more dig. “Every day this man is in the chancellery is one too many,” he said of Friedrich Merz. His co-leader Alice Weidel called it a clear mandate to govern. Sven Schulze, the outgoing CDU minister-president whose party has now lost half its support since 2021, offered the flattest possible concession: “We’re going to have to live with this result.” Merz himself said nothing on the night. He left CDU headquarters in Berlin after ten o’clock and went home.

None of that is protest. Protest is a leaflet, a demonstration, an angry phone-in. What happened in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday was an electorate, in numbers too large to be waved away as an aberration, instructing its political class in the plainest language democracy has: we do not want what you are offering, and we will vote for the only party you have told us we may never vote for, until you notice.

43.8% is not a fringe… It’s an electorate

Here the fair-minded reader is owed a plain statement, because pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. The AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch has been classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation by the state’s own domestic security service since 2023, a finding the party disputes and is contesting through the courts. The federal intelligence agency reached the same verdict about the national party in May 2025. In February this year an administrative court in Cologne provisionally barred the agency from applying that label while the full case is heard, ruling that the evidence assembled so far, drawn mostly from public statements, pointed to strong suspicion rather than proof that the entire party is constitutionally hostile. That is the honest position: contested in law, serious in substance, not yet finally settled. It should be stated once, stated clearly, and not used afterwards to avoid the harder argument.

Because the harder argument is this. Almost half of Saxony-Anhalt did not wake up on Sunday morning and decide, for the first time, to hold views the security services find troubling. They live in a region where German reunification delivered deindustrialisation before it delivered prosperity, where villages have lost their doctors’ surgeries and their shops, where wages lag the old West by a considerable margin thirty-six years after the wall came down, and where the political parties asking for their votes this decade have spent that time managing migration, energy policy and foreign affairs as technical questions to be settled among experts rather than democratic ones to be settled among the people who live with the results.

That settlement has broken. Not because the AfD’s answers are wise. Many of them are not, and this newspaper does not pretend they are. It has broken because the establishment’s answer to a democratic grievance was to declare the grievance out of bounds, and voters have concluded, not unreasonably, that a party willing to break the rule of silence is more use to them than four parties determined to keep it. Forty-three point eight per cent is not a fringe. It is an electorate. The correct response to a bad answer is a better one, not a louder insistence that the question should never have been asked. What that answer would actually look like in office, and who would carry it, is worth setting out in full rather than leaving folded into a general sense of grievance.

From welcome culture to farewell culture 

An AfD government, even a minority one propped up by inertia rather than a mandate, changes what is politically possible well beyond Magdeburg. The party’s national manifesto calls for what it terms a complete reversal of German asylum policy: closed borders for anyone without valid papers, an end to family reunification, and the withdrawal of residency protections currently extended even to asylum seekers in training or employment. Its 2025 conference stripped out a passage guaranteeing recognised refugees permanent residency after ten years. At its heart sit eleven separate demands on deportation, built around a phrase the party has made notorious: a shift from Willkommenskultur, welcome culture, to what its own programme calls Verabschiedungskultur, farewell culture. The word “remigration” carries specific weight in Germany since January 2024, when the investigative outlet Correctiv reported that AfD figures had attended a meeting near Potsdam discussing deportation plans that reportedly extended to German citizens with a migration background, a characterisation the party rejects as a distortion of a policy it says targets only those with no legal right to remain.

Whatever the precise scope, the direction is unambiguous, and it drags the CDU with it. A party that has already moved toward what it calls a de facto asylum freeze at federal level cannot watch an electorate this large reward a harder line without hardening its own further. It also puts Germany at odds with Brussels’ preferred machinery for sharing the burden of asylum across the bloc, since the AfD wants out of EU relocation quotas entirely and permanent national border controls on the Danish model, precisely the unilateralism the EU’s common asylum system was built to prevent. It even dropped, in this year’s revisions, its previous welcome for European workers arriving under EU freedom of movement.

The sharpest edge of this argument, though, is a class one, and it is the one Berlin’s commentariat is least willing to draw. Employers in an ageing economy want plentiful labour and have said so for years. Landlords and asset owners in tight housing markets are indifferent to where new tenants come from, so long as rents keep rising. The working class, competing for the same flats, the same school places and the same GP appointments in towns already stripped of both, absorbs the downward pressure that the beneficiaries of cheap labour do not. And here is the contradiction the AfD would rather voters didn’t examine too closely: its own wider programme offers tax relief weighted toward higher earners, restricts Bürgergeld, the basic welfare payment, to foreign workers only after ten years of paying in, and would replace the current system with a tighter “activating” scheme campaigners warn would hit the low paid of every background hardest. A party courting the working class on immigration while quietly favouring capital on everything else is not a new trick.

But that contradiction should not be allowed to do all the moral work here, as though exposing it settles the matter. Verabschiedungskultur is a tidy piece of language for taking someone out of a job, a school run, a marriage, a life built over a decade, and putting them on a plane. A grievance can be entirely real and the remedy proposed for it can still be cruel. Both things are true at once, and a newspaper that only ever says one of them is not being honest with its readers, whichever one it finds easier to say.

The EU has never had to plan for a Berlin that might say no 

That argument about who decides and who pays does not stop at Germany’s own asylum rules. It runs straight into Brussels, and this is where Sunday’s result may matter more than who eventually sits in the Magdeburg chancellery. For seventy years European integration has run on a single motor: whichever governments sit in Paris and Berlin, both capitals want more Europe, not less, and are willing to spend political capital delivering it. Germany’s centrality to that arrangement is not sentimental. It is the EU’s largest economy, its biggest net contributor to the common budget, and the country whose central bank has underwritten the euro’s credibility since the currency’s creation. When Brussels has needed someone to write the cheque, or take the domestic political hit for a bailout, a sanctions package or a defence commitment, it has been able to assume Berlin would do it.

The AfD’s national manifesto does not hide what it wants instead. Its preamble calls the EU “a failed project” beyond reform. It wants to refound the union as a loose “league of European nations” rather than what it regards as a slow-motion drive toward statehood, rejects any notion of a common “European identity,” and, most tellingly for anyone in Frankfurt or Brussels watching bond markets, wants German membership of the currency union itself put to a referendum. None of that can be enacted from a state chancellery. State governments do not sit in the European Council, and Ulrich Siegmund will not be renegotiating the treaties. 

But the significance was never legislative. It is that Brussels has spent decades planning for a reluctant France, a rebellious Italy, a defiant Hungary and Poland, even a departed Britain, without ever having to plan for its own engine room turning structurally sceptical of the project it built. Saxony-Anhalt is one state of sixteen. But with Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern both voting in a fortnight, and the AfD’s national poll share already sitting as the second-largest force in the Bundestag, this looks less like an outlier than the leading edge of something continuing. Every future sanctions renewal, every enlargement debate, every step toward deeper fiscal or defence integration will now be shadowed by a question Brussels has not previously had to ask out loud: will the German electorate still let its government say yes. That question already has a live answer over Ukraine, and it is not a comfortable one.

The war at the end of the payslip 

Since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, the federal government has provided or committed around €57.6 billion in military assistance to Ukraine and more than €43.3 billion in bilateral civilian support, according to the government’s own figures. “We stand firmly by Ukraine’s side,” Merz said on the country’s independence day in August, as Berlin worked with Brussels to unlock a further €90 billion EU loan and pushed through a twenty-first sanctions package against Moscow. Whatever else is true of German policy since 2022, half-hearted is not one of the charges that sticks. 

Zelensky Accused of Embezzling Millions 

The AfD’s federal manifesto proposes the near opposite: immediate lifting of sanctions on Russia, repair of the Nord Stream pipelines, and a neutral Ukraine sitting permanently outside both NATO and the EU. None of that can be delivered by a state government in Magdeburg. Foreign and defence policy belong to Berlin, and no cargo of artillery shells will turn back at the Saxony-Anhalt border because Siegmund won a plurality of seats. 

But the argument was never really about who signs the export licences. It is about who pays for the policy, and for how long. Germany built an industrial economy on comparatively cheap Russian gas. That relationship’s destruction, layered on top of the closure of nuclear capacity and the costs of the green transition, has fed years of argument about German deindustrialisation that long predate this war and cannot honestly be blamed on it alone. Russia invaded Ukraine; European governments did not sanction Moscow out of caprice; dependence on Russian energy was itself a strategic weakness waiting to be exploited. All of that can be granted in full, and it still leaves standing the question Berlin has never managed to answer to the satisfaction of the people paying for it: how much economic pain, for how long, decided by whom, and on whose behalf? A voter in Halle who has watched their energy bill and their town’s job prospects move in opposite directions for four years is entitled to ask that question without being told it is not theirs to ask. That question is about to be settled less by argument than by arithmetic.

39 seats vs 39 seats – and the BSW’s five hold the balance 

The arithmetic left behind by Sunday’s vote is, in its way, more remarkable than the headline percentage. The AfD’s 39 seats and the combined weight of the CDU, SPD, Greens and Die Linke, also 39 seats, sit exactly level. Neither number clears the 42 needed to govern. Only the BSW’s five delegates can tip either side over that line, and Sahra Wagenknecht’s party has already said, in terms, that it will not be doing so. Her party has made clear it will not join any alliance whose sole shared purpose is keeping the AfD out.

It will also not back Siegmund. Election-law analysts have warned that this studied neutrality carries a real risk: under the rules governing how German states elect a minister-president, a deadlocked chamber can move, after failed majority ballots, to a vote decided by plurality rather than an outright majority, meaning that BSW’s abstention could hand the post to the AfD’s candidate by default rather than by any parliamentary majority actually choosing him. Whether that mechanism is triggered will depend on choices still being made in Magdeburg as this goes to print, and it is worth saying plainly: this is a fast-moving story and the coalition arithmetic could shift again within days.

AfD win What makes the BSW’s position more than a procedural footnote is where it came from. Wagenknecht built her party by walking out of Die Linke, and its instincts on economics, on public ownership, on the state’s obligations to the working class, sit well to the left of anything the AfD would recognise. Yet on Ukraine and on Russia the distance between the two parties all but disappears. Both oppose the trajectory of German policy since 2022. Both want sanctions lifted. Both favour restored relations with Moscow. Both regard the sacrifice being asked of ordinary Germans as a decision made for them rather than with them. That overlap tells us something the political centre in Berlin, London and Brussels alike would rather not sit with: the revolt against the current settlement is not confined to one tribe. It runs from the nationalist right and from the anti-war, redistributive left at the same time, and where those two currents meet, the old map of politics stops explaining what is happening.

Meanwhile, the CDU continues to rule out cooperation with Die Linke on principle, which means the one bloc that could theoretically match the AfD’s 39 votes cannot even agree among itself to try. A firewall that excludes the extreme right while simultaneously refusing to work with the mainstream left is not a firewall. It is a house with three walls, and Sunday’s vote was the wind arriving to test it. As it happens, the same wind reached the English coast the same weekend.

The Channel is not as wide as it looks 

On Saturday, while German pollsters were finishing their last surveys before the Saxony-Anhalt vote, up to five hundred masked men in black blocked the roads into the Port of Dover, chanting “Stop the boats.” On Sunday night, hours after Germans had cast their ballots, riot police fought hundreds more demonstrators on the seafront at Portsmouth, after a single dinghy carrying around 140 people crossed the Channel and was landed there rather than at Dover. Between January and the start of September, some 16,500 people had already made that same crossing this year. Kevin Mills, who leads Dover District Council, said the Saturday protest had been “exceptionally well organised” and had caught the authorities on the hoof. Donna Jones, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight police and crime commissioner, warned it would be “a significant issue” for the government if smuggling routes shifted further along the south coast, adding bluntly, “we’re not set up for it.” 

This is not analogy. It did not need a columnist to draw a line between Magdeburg and the Kent coast. Treasury minister Emma Reynolds, the same minister who had told Times Radio only days earlier that her government would not be “reaching out to a far-right populist party” when asked about the AfD, spent Monday morning calling the Portsmouth crowd “thuggish.” Reform’s economic spokesman Robert Jenrick took the opposite line, posting that “the invasion comes to Portsmouth, home of the Royal Navy,” and promising his party would “end this humiliation.” Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who had met Emmanuel Macron only days before to discuss “scaling up” the fight against the crossings, now finds his government using the language of public order about people his own backbenches privately admit it has failed for a year to reassure. 

Britain’s political establishment is entitled to condemn masked men blocking a working port, and this publication does not withhold that condemnation. But Reynolds is also entitled to notice, if she is honest with herself, that grouping the AfD with Reform UK and then watching several hundred of her own citizens block a port two days later is not a coincidence she can file away as a German problem. This country had that argument once already, in 2016, when a comfortable majority of the commentating class assumed migration could be administered, sovereignty could be pooled and economic policy insulated from public feeling, right up until it wasn’t. Germany is not Britain and the AfD, whatever its faults, is not a simple German UKIP; the historical weight it carries is heavier by an order of magnitude, and that difference must never be minimised. But the mechanism by which an establishment convinces itself a question is illegitimate, and is then astonished when people answer it anyway on a ring road rather than a ballot paper, is not a German invention. Britain wrote that playbook first, and this weekend it opened the book again. 

It is also worth noting, in fairness, that Reform’s own house is not in order while it points at everyone else’s. Two of Nigel Farage’s most senior aides, his longtime adviser Dan Jukes and the party’s head of policy James Orr, resigned last week after an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News alleged the party had discussed routing foreign money, including a proposed £500,000 donation, through a UK intermediary in breach of electoral law. “The party has not taken any dodgy money or anything like that whatsoever,” Farage insisted, calling the sting an exercise in entrapment. Reform denies wrongdoing, the Metropolitan Police and the Electoral Commission have both been asked to look at the claims, and nothing has been proven in any court. It should be reported as exactly that: a serious, contested allegation, not a verdict. But it is a useful reminder that the populist right offers no cleaner a relationship with money and power than the establishment it condemns. The working class does not need a better class of grifter. It needs someone willing to answer the question honestly.

What Saxony-Anhalt actually proves 

Saxony-Anhalt alone will not remove Germany from NATO, tear up its sanctions regime or reopen Nord Stream. Three seats is still three seats. But look at the same weekend from further back and the pattern stops being a German story at all. On Saturday, masked men blockaded an English port. On Sunday, riot police fought a crowd on an English seafront. On Sunday too, a German state handed the party its own intelligence service calls extremist the largest share of the vote any party has won there since reunification, arithmetic tied at thirty-nine, a Brussels that has never before had to plan for a Berlin that might not want to lead it anywhere. None of these events caused one another. All of them are the same failure arriving by different roads: three governing classes that have spent a decade treating the patience of the working class as a resource to be managed rather than a democracy’s most basic debt to be repaid.

Nobody who wants a decent, plural, functioning politics should welcome the AfD’s rise, and nothing in this piece should be read as doing so. Nor should anyone welcome the shouting on the Dover ring road as an answer, because it is not one; a grievance can be entirely real and the response to it can still be ugly, and pretending otherwise flatters no one. But nobody serious about democracy should welcome the alternative on offer either, in Berlin or in London: a governing class that manages discontent instead of representing it, and calls the management strategy a firewall on one side of the Channel and a policing operation on the other. Three seats short is not the same as safe. Neither, this weekend has just proved, is twenty-one miles of grey water.