Germany’s Far Right Scores Historic Win in Saxony-Anhalt: Can the Firewall Hold?

For Merz, the result is a direct test of whether the political centre can contain a movement that has ceased to look like a protest vote.

The collapse of the old conservative bargain

The most striking figure is not the AfD’s 43.8%, but the CDU’s fall from 37.1% to 17.2%.

That collapse points to something deeper than a successful far-right campaign. The traditional conservative party has lost more than half of its previous support in a state where economic frustration, demographic decline and distrust in institutions have accumulated over decades.

Saxony-Anhalt carries a particular legacy of the transformation that followed German reunification. The rapid transition after 1989 brought industrial collapse, population loss, ageing communities and lower wage levels than in western Germany. The economic model associated with the postwar and later “Third Way” mainstream delivered growth and competitiveness in parts of the country, but it also left regions where the social costs of market liberalisation remained visible long after the political language of reform had moved on.

That history matters because political discontent rarely arrives in the form of a clean economic argument.

When wages stagnate, public assets disappear, labour becomes less secure, and communities lose population, voters do not necessarily demand a new model of redistribution. They may instead search for someone to blame.

The AfD has proved exceptionally effective at converting those grievances into a politics of identity.

Its message links economic insecurity to immigration, institutional distrust to political elites and social change to a perceived loss of national control. The result is a political offer that does not need to solve every underlying problem. It only needs to persuade voters that the established parties are responsible for them.

The firewall is now facing the voters it was built to contain

Merz has responded by insisting that the CDU will maintain the Brandmauer against the AfD. He called the result “deeply shocking” and the worst CDU defeat in decades, but rejected calls to step aside, saying that giving up was not an option.

That position preserves an important political distinction. But it also creates an increasingly difficult institutional problem.

With 39 seats, the AfD is close enough to a parliamentary majority to make its exclusion from cooperation politically consequential. The remaining parties have enough seats to prevent AfD control, but not an obvious ideological basis for governing together. The CDU would have to work with parties that occupy very different positions on economic policy, migration, energy and the role of the state.

The Brandmauer therefore does not remove the AfD from politics. It changes the cost of its success for everyone else.

Every mainstream party can refuse cooperation. None can make 43.8% of voters disappear.

That tension is likely to become one of the central questions for European centre-right politics: how long can a firewall remain politically credible when the party on the other side is no longer marginal?

There is no immediate mechanism for the Saxony-Anhalt result to trigger early federal elections, and the outcome should not be read as an automatic collapse of Merz’s government. But it does expose the vulnerability of the governing political model. The CDU cannot simply treat the AfD as an external threat while ignoring why conservative voters have moved towards it.

A protest vote has become an alternative political pole

Previous AfD successes could more easily be interpreted as regional protest votes. Saxony-Anhalt is harder to dismiss in those terms.

The party has not merely increased its representation. It has established electoral primacy.

That changes the relationship between the AfD and the mainstream parties. A party that wins 43.8% can present itself not as an outsider demanding attention, but as the political expression of a substantial share of the electorate. Its radical programme gains a stronger claim to legitimacy simply because its electoral base has become so large.

This is where moral condemnation becomes insufficient.

European leaders have reacted with alarm. France’s minister for Europe, Benjamin Haddad, described the result as a very serious moment for Europe. Poland’s Donald Tusk said only “idiots or traitors” could celebrate it. Spain’s Pedro Sánchez blamed the result on traditional conservatives capitulating to radical agendas.

Their concern is understandable. But external condemnation does little to answer the domestic question confronting Germany: why are so many voters willing to use the far right to express their dissatisfaction with the political system?

The answer cannot simply be foreign interference.

The social contract has become the battleground

The more consequential story is the erosion of confidence in the liberal centre.

For decades, mainstream European politics was organised around a broad bargain. Centre-left and centre-right parties disagreed over taxation, welfare and the size of government, but broadly accepted the same institutional framework. Economic growth, public services and representative institutions were expected to sustain political legitimacy.

That consensus has weakened.

Marketisation, labour-market insecurity, privatisation and regional economic neglect did not automatically create far-right voters. But they weakened the material foundations on which political moderation depended. Where citizens feel that institutions have become distant while economic and demographic conditions deteriorate, appeals to stability lose some of their force.

The political centre has often responded with institutional language: defending democratic norms, strengthening enforcement, policing extremism and insisting on the boundaries of acceptable politics.

Those measures can protect institutions. They cannot substitute for political representation.

The AfD’s advantage is that it can turn almost every institutional response into evidence for its own argument. A stronger firewall becomes proof that the political establishment fears the electorate. Moral condemnation becomes evidence that mainstream parties refuse to listen. Enforcement becomes another symbol of a system supposedly more interested in controlling dissent than addressing insecurity.

That creates a feedback loop in which the methods used to defend the centre can themselves become material for attacking it.

The far right is no longer operating nationally

The reaction to Saxony-Anhalt also reveals another change: far-right politics is increasingly transnational.

Elon Musk publicly congratulated the AfD with “Gut gemacht!” on X, after which AfD co-leaders Alice Weidel and regional leader Ulrich Sigmund offered strong and constructive cooperation. European populists including Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Spain’s Santiago Abascal, Austria’s Herbert Kickl, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and Britain’s Rupert Lowe also celebrated the result.

The significance lies less in any individual endorsement than in the network behind it.

A regional German election can now become an international political event almost instantly. Technology platforms allow foreign political figures, wealthy entrepreneurs and parties elsewhere in Europe to intervene directly in a domestic political conversation, bypassing traditional media structures and national party organisations.

That does not mean external actors created the AfD’s electorate. The underlying grievances are domestic.

But international amplification can change the political environment in which those grievances are organised. It gives national movements a wider ideological ecosystem, a sense of common purpose and access to audiences beyond their own borders.

For European governments, this creates a problem that cannot be solved through national politics alone.

The same pattern is visible in Britain, where demonstrations by masked, black-clad right-wing activists in Dover and Portsmouth have revived arguments over whether the Public Order Act 1936 should be used against intimidating street movements. The legislation was introduced to restrict the street mobilisation of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. The recurrence of that debate alongside the German result is a reminder that the contest over the limits of far-right mobilisation is not confined to one country.

The harder question for Europe’s centre

The instinct of mainstream parties is to defend the existing political order.

The harder task is to make that order worth defending to voters who no longer believe it delivers security, representation or a fair share of economic gains.

That requires more than defeating the AfD at the next election. It means rebuilding the social and political foundations on which the centre once depended: credible economic security, functioning regional institutions, public services and a sense that democratic politics can still alter material conditions.

Without that, the Brandmauer risks becoming a barrier protecting an increasingly narrow political space rather than a strategy for recovering lost voters.