AfD breakthrough shows Germany’s firewall against the far right is breaking

In February 2025, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) emerged as the second-largest party in the German Bundestag after the country’s federal elections. Observing those results in Berlin, I was reminded of Bob Dylan singing “For the times they are a-changin”.Eighteen months later, the time seems to have changed, not yet in the whole of Germany, but definitely in its eastern State of Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD has won a resounding 43.8 per cent vote in the State election of Saxony-Anhalt, more than doubling its 2021 tally of 20.8 per cent and taking 39 of the 83 seats in the State’s Landtag (assembly), leaving it just three short of an outright majority. Every other party that has crossed the 5 per cent threshold has, for now and at least publicly, ruled out any coalition with the AfD.Yet formal exclusion does not necessarily settle the question. At least three possible routes are being discussed to form an AfD-led government. First, it could open talks with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), potentially creating further division within the Chancellor’s party ranks over supporting the AfD and whether the Brandmauer(firewall) can hold. Second, the AfD could pursue its own version of the “Operation Lotus” strategy to persuade individual CDU lawmakers to break ranks and back the AfD’s 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund for Minister-President, without any formal coalition in public view. There is also a third possibility: lawmakers from the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) could show their support by abstaining in a later round of voting, allowing Siegmund to win with fewer votes and govern a minority government. The BSW, on its part, has been quite unsure about how it wants to deal with the AfD. None of these outcomes is guaranteed yet, but it is definitely a materially different situation from “the AfD fell three seats short” or “the firewall persists” story.It also fits a pattern that goes well beyond just this one State. A Journal of Democracy report from March this year, which came right after the results in the economically strong south-western States of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, pointed to substantial electoral shifts with repercussions far beyond the regional level. It suggested that nearly half of the voters in south-western Germany were now open to cooperation between other parties and the AfD. For the CDU, for example, one in five respondents preferred a coalition between the CDU and the AfD. This suggests that the Brandmauer is being actively tested. It holds now. But whether it will hold a second or third time remains an open question and answering it will require looking past the vote and understanding the fragility of the arithmetic behind it—what is breaking the CDU’s support and what any of this means for Germany’s behaviour outside its borders.For readers outside Germany, the uncertainty stemming from the results in Saxony-Anhalt itself is the most important thing. For close to a decade, the Brandmauer against the AfD worked for the country’s mainstream parties, as it cost them relatively little since they had seats to spare. But now, with the AfD close enough to a majority at 43.8 per cent, keeping it out will require a complete coalition of the mainstream parties that agree on little else, including the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Greens, and, in some cases, the Left. If they stay together, they will be held by their mutual opposition to the far-right AfD rather than by any shared programme and thus will be largely seen as a blocking manoeuvre dressed as a governing coalition.Such manoeuvres are inherently unstable, producing governments that cannot claim a mandate and disagree on budgets. Inherently, they hand over the excluded party its best possible argument that the “establishment” needs an anti-establishment opposition. With upcoming elections in the States of Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, we will witness the mainstream’s margin of error shrink further. The Brandmaueris a stopgap and an unscalable strategy whose end date seems near, even if no one can say precisely when.CDU, AfD, and "reunification”The scale of the CDU’s collapse in Saxony-Anhalt warrants scrutiny as the trend could extend to the problem the party faces nationally. In the 2021 State elections, the party received 37.1 per cent of the vote; and now, with 17.2 per cent in 2026, its share and probably its presence have essentially halved. All the while, its own leader, Friedrich Merz, sits in the Chancellery in Berlin, albeit with diminishing popularity. These are bad optics, especially because it lost ground to the AfD and not to any of the established parties. This has also happened while the Merz-led CDU has attempted to steal the AfD’s thunder, especially on immigration.The Merz administration has already tightened border controls and hardened its asylum rhetoric with an explicit attempt to blunt the AfD’s appeal on its core issue. Unfortunately, this co-opting has not worked for the CDU and has further strengthened the AfD. Not only has it not worked, but the geography of where it did not work is instructive.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (left) with Sven Schulze, State premier for Saxony-Anhalt, at a news conference in Berlin on September 7. The AfD’s best-ever result in the State election amid growing public discontent with the political establishment delivered a powerful blow to Merz. | Photo Credit: KRISZTIAN BOCSI/BLOOMBERG While the AfD has slowly gained presence in former West Germany, its strength remains heavily concentrated in former East Germany, precisely the region with less direct exposure to migration—or even (from east to the west). For example, figures show immigrant-background populations of approximately 36.5 per cent in the western city-state of Bremen compared with 7.8 per cent in Thuringia—a nearly five-fold gap, contrasting with the AfD’s persistent emphasis on immigration as a political threat in Thuringia where it emerged as the single largest party in the 2024 State elections but was kept out of the government by a CDU-led coalition.The political divide also rests on the economic reality that still exists between the two erstwhile halves of Germany, even after 36 years of reunification. While eastern Germany is considerably more prosperous than it was in 1990, the overall convergence has yet to occur: as of 2024, the full-time workers in the west were still about one-fifth higher than in the east, while they remained 2.2 per cent higher in the east as of 2025. There is a deeper divide in accumulated wealth, with eastern households substantially less wealthy than western households. Further, the east continues to lose its working-age population as young, skilled workers move west. The overall data suggest that while the east has become richer, it is yet to be economically equal to the west, thus leaving a persistent gap between parity and improvement that immigration alone cannot explain.The issue of immigration in Saxony-Anhalt may therefore function more as a vocabulary for grievances rooted in incomplete convergence and demographic decline, and less as a direct reflection of everyday demographic reality. A mainstream party that adopts a challenger’s language on an issue that might not actually be the only local problem risks validating the challenger’s diagnosis without addressing anything voters actually experience from day to day, which may thus be the more precise reason why the CDU’s rightward shift has not bought it much yet.The Indian angleThis is where the story stops being a German curiosity and becomes relevant to how readers of Indian foreign policy view the next few years from the perspective of the India-EU relationship. Germany continues to be the EU’s fiscal anchor and, along with France, its most consequential political voice. The CDU-led federal government is now left with limited political capital to fight off the AfD at home, and it can no longer take its domestic Brandmauerfor granted; thus, it is left with little room to spend its capital abroad on EU enlargement, on Ukraine funding, or on any long-term projects that would require a sustained German commitment.

Alternative for Germany (AfD) party leaders and members celebrate following the announcement of the results of State elections in Saxony-Anhalt, in Magdeburg, on September 6, 2026. | Photo Credit: KRISZTIAN BOCSI/BLOOMBERG For New Delhi, this could also have a direct impact on the India-EU free trade agreement (FTA) and on Germany’s and the EU’s broader Indo-Pacific strategy, as both will depend on Berlin’s willingness to expend its political capital externally while firefighting domestically. This does not mean that Berlin’s policy towards New Delhi will reverse overnight, as the commercial and bureaucratic momentum on the FTA is logical and real. But a Germany that could be constantly busy managing its own political fragmentation could most definitely be a more cautious and less ambitious anchor for the European continent to lean on. Therefore, the German political Autobahn should be closely followed by Indian policymakers, who have spent recent years courting Europe as a hedge against overdependence on any single power.It is pertinent to remember that none of this is unique to Germany in Europe. France, Italy, Sweden, and the Netherlands have each, in their own way, moved from the politics of exclusion to the politics of inclusion in their dealings with the populists. For nearly eight decades, Germany has been viewed as a country that is too scarred by its own past ever to test that boundary. This election has just shown how close the test now is. And the more useful question now is not whether Germany is different from the rest of the European world, but how many near misses the German establishment will get before the arithmetic stops cooperating.Ashutosh Nagda is a Senior Researcher with the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS), New Delhi. He is a former German Chancellor Fellow (2023-24) and regularly writes on Germany and India’s foreign policy and domestic politics.Also Read | What hope for Germany?Also Read | Jean-Luc Melénchon: Indefatigable fighter for a new France