Yasemin Aydın
42 percent.
That is where the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, stands in the final ARD pre-election poll in Saxony-Anhalt, conducted less than two weeks before the state election on September 6.
The Christian Democratic Union, the CDU, is at only 22 percent. The Left stands at 11 percent, the Social Democrats at eight and the Greens at six. The liberal FDP and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, BSW, would currently fail to cross the threshold for entering parliament.
The poll is not a prediction of the final result. But the scale of the shift is remarkable. In the 2021 state election, the AfD received 20.8 percent. It is now polling at roughly twice that level. The CDU, which won 37.1 percent in 2021 and has held the office of minister-president in Saxony-Anhalt since 2002, has fallen to 22 percent.
To understand why this matters, international readers first need to understand what Saxony-Anhalt is and what exactly is being elected.
A small state with potentially large consequences
Saxony-Anhalt is one of Germany’s 16 federal states, located in the eastern part of the country. Its capital is Magdeburg.
At the end of 2025, it had approximately 2.12 million inhabitants. Germany as a whole had roughly 83.47 million. In other words, only around 2.54 percent of Germany’s population lives in Saxony-Anhalt. Around 1.69 million people are eligible to vote in the September election.
Germany, however, is a federal country. State governments are not merely regional administrations. They exercise substantial authority over areas such as education, policing, cultural policy and parts of public administration. They also participate in federal politics through Germany’s second chamber, the Bundesrat.
That is why developments in a relatively small state can have consequences far beyond its borders.
The election system also matters.
Voters in Saxony-Anhalt have two votes. The first is cast for a candidate in one of 41 constituencies. Whoever receives the most votes there wins a direct seat. The second vote is cast for a political party and is decisive for the overall proportional distribution of seats in the state parliament, the Landtag.
The parliament normally has at least 83 members. Parties generally need at least five percent of the second vote to participate in the distribution of seats.
And there is one particularly important point for anyone watching Germany from abroad:
Becoming the largest party does not automatically mean forming the government.
The minister-president—the equivalent of a state premier—is elected by the Landtag. In the first ballot, a candidate requires a majority of all members. If no party controls a majority on its own, coalition-building becomes decisive.
So even an AfD result of 42 percent would not automatically produce an AfD government.
But it would fundamentally transform the political landscape.
The comforting myth of the “protest voter”
For years, Germans have described many AfD supporters as Protestwähler—protest voters.
It is a comforting term. Protest sounds temporary. Someone who protests is supposedly trying to send the political establishment a message. If mainstream parties listen, the assumption goes, that person may eventually return.
That assumption may itself have become part of the problem. Political scientist Marcel Lewandowsky has repeatedly argued that simple explanations of populist success are insufficient. Behind support for parties such as the AfD lie deeper patterns: mistrust of political institutions and traditional media, a feeling of not being heard, and, among some voters, the conviction that democratic institutions no longer work for people like them.
What was once a more volatile electorate has, in part, become a stable political constituency.
The numbers on political competence illustrate the transformation.
Before the 2021 election, 40 percent of voters in Saxony-Anhalt regarded the CDU as the party most capable of solving the state’s most important problems. By July 2026, that figure had collapsed to 16 percent.
For the AfD, the movement went in precisely the opposite direction: from nine percent in 2021 to 36 percent in July 2026.
And confidence in the functioning of the state is strikingly low. In a May 2026 survey, only 16 percent expressed high confidence that the state was successfully fulfilling its responsibilities.
This is more than a shift to the right.
It is a transfer of political trust.
None of this means that 42 percent of voters hold an identical or completely developed far-right worldview.
But the opposite assumption is no longer convincing either: that most of these voters simply do not know what they are voting for.
Since November 2023, the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch has been classified by the state domestic intelligence service as a confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor. The authority says its assessment is based, among other things, on political agitation directed against the principles of human dignity and democracy embedded in Germany’s constitutional order.
That information is publicly available.
The more difficult question is therefore no longer simply:
Why do people vote for the AfD despite its radicalism?
We also have to ask:
What political, psychological and social needs does this identity satisfy?
Migration is an issue—but also a symbol
Migration undoubtedly plays an important role.
It would be a mistake to dismiss it as merely an excuse.
For many AfD supporters, migration, internal security, cultural change and the question of who gets to define social norms are genuine political concerns.
But populist communication turns migration into something larger.
It becomes a symbol of lost control.
If people feel that their surroundings are changing, that important decisions are being made elsewhere and that their own cultural assumptions are losing influence, migration is no longer experienced merely as a policy question.
It becomes a question of identity.
And that distinction matters.
Psychologically, people generally react more strongly to perceived loss than to equivalent gains. Someone who believes they are losing status, cultural familiarity or social recognition will rarely be persuaded by statistics alone.
You can correct a number about immigration without changing the feeling underneath it.
This is one reason populist communication can be so effective. It compresses complicated social transformations into an emotionally intelligible story:
We are losing something. They caused it. We will give it back to you.
Politically, that is extremely powerful.
Saxony-Anhalt is not simply “the East”
There is another comfortable explanation: this is simply what happens in eastern Germany.
That is also too easy.
Saxony-Anhalt has a specific history. The upheavals that followed German reunification, economic and biographical ruptures, population decline, migration toward western Germany, weaker institutional attachments and the perception that important decisions are made “above” or “in the West” have left lasting marks.
These factors do not explain every AfD vote.
And they do not excuse extremist positions.
But Saxony-Anhalt should not be treated as an exotic democratic exception either.
Right-wing populist and anti-establishment parties have grown across many Western democracies.
Eastern Germany may simply be revealing, earlier and more dramatically, developments that are moderated elsewhere by stronger party loyalties, more resilient institutions or different demographic structures.
Saxony-Anhalt may therefore be better understood not as an exception, but as a political seismograph.
Democracy, after all, depends on more than constitutions and elections.
It also depends on a sense of political efficacy:
My vote matters. People like me are visible. I have some influence over what happens to my life.
When that feeling disappears for long enough, populists become exceptionally good at filling the vacuum.
Then comes the algorithm
For younger voters, there is another factor: they increasingly inhabit a political public sphere that operates according to entirely different rules.
Social media platforms have partially taken over functions once performed by television, newspapers and radio.
But recommendation algorithms do not primarily reward political balance.
They reward attention.
And attention is reliably generated by emotion, conflict, outrage, simplification and boundary-breaking.
A study examining young users’ social-media feeds during Germany’s 2025 federal election campaign illustrates the imbalance. The AfD accounted for 21.5 percent of videos uploaded by official party accounts in the study, but 37.4 percent of the political videos recommended to the young user profiles. On TikTok, content tagged with the AfD began appearing within an average of 11 to 12 minutes.
This does not mean that TikTok turns teenagers into extremists.
That would be as simplistic as the protest-voter explanation.
Algorithms do not invent social conflict from nothing.
But they can amplify existing emotions, repeatedly validate particular interpretations of reality and create the impression that a political position is more dominant, widespread or normal than it actually is outside an individual feed.
AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund appears to understand this logic particularly well.
His communication is not a permanent stream of angry ideological speeches.
It also shows a smiling, approachable politician: riding a moped, visiting local festivals, talking to ordinary people.
Political radicalism is combined with everyday life, nostalgia and familiarity.
That matters.
Political normalization does not require radical demands themselves to become moderate.
Radical ideas can also become normalized when they are delivered by a familiar, personable and apparently ordinary messenger.
Germany’s “firewall” cannot solve a cultural problem
This brings German politics to a difficult dilemma.
Germany has developed the concept of the Brandmauer, literally a “firewall”: mainstream democratic parties generally refuse to govern together with the AfD.
Given the official extremist classification of the party’s Saxony-Anhalt branch, institutional distance is understandable.
But the firewall answers only one question:
Who will democratic parties refuse to govern with?
It does not answer the more difficult one:
Why do growing numbers of citizens feel better represented by the AfD than by every other party?
Moral outrage alone cannot answer that question.
But copying the AfD does not necessarily work either.
As Lewandowsky and other researchers of populism have noted, when mainstream parties repeatedly adopt the themes, frames and language on which a populist competitor has built its identity, they may reinforce the competitor rather than weaken it.
The political centre therefore faces a genuine challenge.
It cannot deny real problems.
But neither can it adopt its opponent’s entire worldview in an attempt to win voters back.
Democracy needs a language of its own.
The deeper deficit is narrative
This may be the central problem.
Populists tell powerful stories.
Not necessarily accurate stories.
But emotionally intelligible ones.
There is a “we.”
That “we” has been injured.
There are people responsible.
And there is a future in which the lost order can be restored.
Democratic politics often answers with a very different vocabulary:
Budgetary constraints.
European competencies.
Coalition compromises.
Constitutional limitations.
Administrative procedures.
All of these things are real. They are part of democratic government.
But people do not live by administrative reality alone.
They also need an idea of which society they belong to—and where that society is going.
If democratic parties merely explain why the populist story is false, they still leave their opponents in possession of the most valuable asset:
the story itself.
The democratic answer to populism therefore cannot consist of fact-checking alone.
It must rebuild a sense of democratic belonging.
A society must be able to tell people:
Change is real, but it does not mean that you are disappearing.
Migration changes the country, but belonging does not have to be a zero-sum game.
Democracy is slow and frustrating, but you are not irrelevant within it.
The future does not automatically mean loss.
That may sound abstract.
Politically, it is extremely concrete.
It means functioning schools. Accessible public administration. Reliable infrastructure outside large cities. Economic opportunity. Political representation.
And perhaps most importantly, a public sphere in which people do not first have to become radical before someone listens to them.
Saxony-Anhalt is a test case
Saxony-Anhalt contains only about one German in forty.
But what happens there on September 6 could reverberate far beyond a state of 2.12 million people.
If the AfD becomes the largest party, that alone would mark a historic shift. If it ever became part of a state government, the consequences would no longer be merely symbolic: German states control important areas including education, police, culture and administration.
And at the national level, an AfD-led government in any German state would represent another stage in the party’s political normalization.
Yet perhaps the deeper test comes even before the question of government formation.
Saxony-Anhalt is asking whether a liberal democracy can regain citizens whose political alienation has already become part of their identity.
The necessary answer is also the hardest one:
To take people seriously without affirming every conclusion they draw.
To understand fears without turning those fears into enemies.
To discuss migration, security and economic decline openly without adopting the language of ethnic exclusion.
And to defend democratic boundaries without reducing democracy to the defence of boundaries.
That is why the term “protest voter” has become inadequate. It transforms a structural development into a temporary mood. Forty-two percent is not a passing tantrum.
It is the result of a longer political, social and communicative process.
On September 6, Saxony-Anhalt will therefore be voting on more than who governs a relatively small eastern German state.
It will show how far a political counter-identity has already become normalized and whether Germany’s democratic centre can still offer something more powerful than fear of its opponent.