After the election in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany is once again asking the same question: How did the AfD become this strong? But a party that has reached 43.8 percent cannot be explained in a single article, by a single cause, or through the familiar clichés that appear on election night; however confidently some of those sweeping explanations may circulate on social media.
This is therefore the first of a six -part series examining the rise of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and the response of German democracy from several different angles: the shift from protest vote to political belonging; the knot connecting economics, migration and identity; the strategic dilemma facing Germany’s Christian Democrats; the erosion of shared reality and trust in truth; and, finally, what could actually change if the radical right moves from opposition politics to real executive power.
Let me make one thing clear at the outset. This series does not begin from a scenario of democratic catastrophe. Quite the opposite. My aim is to understand the scale of the change without either minimising it or forgetting how resilient Germany’s democratic institutions, civil society and broad political centre remain.
The AfD’s 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt cannot be explained simply as anger at Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government, economic hardship or a specifically East German protest reflex.
The deeper shift is this: for a growing share of its voters, the AfD is ceasing to be a temporary instrument used to punish “the system”. It is becoming a source of political identity, belonging and, increasingly, a vision of the future.
First, get the scale right
To understand what happened on 6 September 2026, we should begin with scale.
Saxony-Anhalt is one of Germany’s 16 federal states, or Länder. It lies in the former East Germany and has a population of roughly 2.12 million. Its economy accounts for only around 1.8 percent of Germany’s total output.
So an AfD result of 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt does not mean that 44 percent of Germans support the party.
But that does not make the result insignificant. Quite the opposite.
Saxony-Anhalt is not Germany. But it is part of Germany.
And sometimes a dramatic political shift in a relatively small state functions less as a national verdict than as a magnifying glass: it tells us where to look, which assumptions have stopped working and which social changes may be further advanced than we realised.
The AfD had received 20.8 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt in 2021. Five years later, it more than doubled that share to 43.8 percent. The Christian Democratic Union, the CDU — the centre-right party that has governed the state for most of the period since 2002 — fell from 37.1 percent to 17.2 percent.
Turnout, meanwhile, jumped from 60.3 to 77.8 percent.
Of all those figures, one stands out to me. According to the election analysis of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which is affiliated with the CDU, the AfD mobilised roughly 170,000 people who had previously not voted. They accounted for close to a third of the party’s second votes, the ballot that largely determines proportional representation in the state parliament.
That matters because the AfD is no longer growing simply by taking angry voters from other parties. It is also persuading people who had effectively withdrawn from electoral politics that politics is worth participating in again- because this party speaks to them.
That is a different kind of political mobilisation.
The AfD is no longer simply the party of “no”
For years, one of the most comfortable ways of explaining the AfD’s rise was to call it a Protestpartei: a protest party.
The term was politically and psychologically reassuring. Protest, after all, is presumed to be temporary. Voters get angry, punish the government and, when circumstances improve, eventually return.
Saxony-Anhalt makes that assumption increasingly difficult to sustain.
Fifty-five percent of AfD voters said they had chosen the party out of conviction — Überzeugung in German. Only 35 percent described disappointment as their main motivation.
Even more importantly, the AfD is no longer perceived merely as “the party that talks tough on migration”. Thirty-five percent of voters in the state now say they trust the AfD most to solve the most important political problems. Five years earlier, that figure was just 9 percent.
In 2021, only 8 percent believed the AfD had the best answers on the economy. By 2026, that figure had risen to 30 percent — putting it ahead of the CDU.
That may ultimately tell us more than the 43.8 percent itself.
A protest party becomes something else when voters stop saying, “I am voting for them to punish you,” and begin to say, “I believe these people can govern.”
That is the psychological threshold between protest and power.
The most important number may be 87
The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is not simply another conservative party.
Since 2023, the state branch of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz, has classified the local AfD as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation — in German, a gesichert rechtsextremistische Bestrebung.
Yet here is perhaps the more consequential number:
Eighty-seven percent of AfD voters say that while there may be individual right-wing extremists in the party, they consider the AfD as a whole to be part of the political centre.
To me, this may be the most revealing finding of the Saxony-Anhalt election.
Because what has shifted is not simply how people vote.
It is their understanding of where the centre lies.
Political normalisation rarely arrives as a dramatic moment in which millions of people wake up one morning and declare themselves radicals. The boundary usually moves quietly. An idea that was unsayable yesterday becomes debatable today, one legitimate position among many tomorrow, and, eventually, something that feels perfectly ordinary.
But this is exactly where the analysis also needs restraint.
To conclude from this that “Germany has become far-right” would be every bit as misleading as continuing to dismiss the AfD as a temporary protest phenomenon.
The other Germany is still there
The Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s extensive 2024/25 Mitte-Studie, a long-running study of political attitudes in the German mainstream, found that 76.1 percent of Germans reject right-wing extremist positions. Only 3.3 percent were classified as holding a consistently right-wing extremist worldview.
And it is worth remembering what this same society did only a little over two years ago.
In January 2024, reporting on a meeting in Potsdam attended by several AfD figures revealed discussions around the concept of “remigration” and proposals involving the removal of large numbers of people from Germany.
The reaction was extraordinary.
From Berlin and Hamburg to Munich and smaller towns, people took to the streets. According to organisers, roughly 1.4 million people participated in demonstrations over the weekend of 19–21 January alone. The protests continued for weeks. Then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz soon spoke of “millions” of citizens demonstrating in defence of democracy.
And they did so with remarkable speed, without waiting for a political party to manufacture the mobilisation from above.
So the Germany in which the AfD has now received 43.8 percent in one relatively small state is also the Germany in which millions mobilised against radical-right ideas of “remigration”.
Both realities are true.
Germany did not turn into an authoritarian country overnight because of several election results. Nor did the huge demonstrations stop the radical right from continuing to grow.
That coexistence may be the more important story: a resilient democratic society and a remarkably powerful radical right can exist in the same country at the same time.
Which is why we also need to look at the second side of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s findings.
Only 52 percent now say that German democracy works well overall. Some 34.1 percent agree that, when the national interest requires it, not everyone should necessarily be granted the same rights. Another 25.3 percent believe too much consideration is given to minorities. And the proportion saying they do not trust democratic elections has roughly tripled over four years.
The correct diagnosis, then, should be more nuanced than “Germany is moving to the far right.”
Germany still has a broad democratic majority. At the same time, some illiberal ideas that once sat more clearly at the political margins are moving closer to the mainstream.
These two facts can coexist.
And that is why the struggle taking place is not simply a struggle “against the AfD”. It is increasingly a contest over the boundaries of the democratic centre itself: what it includes, what it excludes and which principles remain non-negotiable.
There is no single “AfD voter”
There is another shortcut we should avoid: treating the entire 43.8 percent as a single ideological bloc.
Research shows substantial differences within the AfD electorate, ranging from comparatively moderate conservatives to voters with much more authoritarian and radical-right attitudes.
So saying that “43.8 percent of Saxony-Anhalt is far-right” is not supported by the evidence.
But the opposite simplification is equally misleading:
“They are ordinary people. They are just angry.”
A voter does not have to hold a fully coherent far-right ideology to become part of a far-right political project.
The strength of political movements rarely comes from gathering people who believe exactly the same thing. It comes from giving people with very different grievances a common answer to the question: Who are “we”?
That is where the AfD has become considerably more sophisticated.
More than a campaign: building a social space
Political scientist and populism expert Marcel Lewandowsky has drawn attention to another dimension of the AfD’s success in Saxony-Anhalt: its strength is not based on rhetoric alone.
Particularly in smaller towns and rural areas, the party is building a physical and social presence.
Family festivals. Town-square events. Local symbols. Social-media images.
Individually, these may seem trivial. Together, they create something larger than a political brand: a sense that “we are here, and we are one of you.”
Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD politician who led the party to first place in Saxony-Anhalt, has been especially effective at this.
Rather than presenting himself as an immaculate professional politician, Siegmund cultivated something much more familiar: the neighbour’s son, the approachable family man, the sort of figure Germans might jokingly describe as the ideal son-in-law.
His appearances with an old Simson motorcycle- an object with particular cultural resonance in former East Germany- were therefore more than charming campaign photography.
They carried a political message: “I am one of you.”
His social-media presence shows how consistently that message has been constructed.
Far-right groups organising community festivals in economically and structurally weaker regions is not a new phenomenon. Similar strategies can be traced back to the 1990s.
The more uncomfortable question, then, is perhaps not why the AfD is doing this so successfully. It is why democratic parties have found it so difficult to build equally durable relationships in the same places.
In other words, the challenge is not to reach people every four or five years when an election approaches. It is to be present in their lives.
Politics cannot outsource belonging to campaign season.
The task facing Germany’s democratic parties therefore goes far beyond finding a better slogan. It is about rebuilding local spaces, social structures, representation and, ultimately, belonging.
Perhaps “rebuilding” is not even the right word everywhere. In some places, those relationships have to be built almost from scratch.
And then there are the young
Anyone who still imagines the AfD primarily as the party of older, angry East German men is looking away from the evidence.
In Saxony-Anhalt, 41 percent of voters under 25 backed the AfD. The party came first across every age group; only among voters over 70 was the CDU roughly level with it.
That statistic alone should make us cautious about explaining everything through the trauma of German reunification.
A generation that never experienced the German Democratic Republic, was born years after reunification and was still children when Angela Merkel made her defining refugee-policy decisions in 2015 is voting for the AfD at rates above 40 percent.
The explanation therefore cannot lie only in the GDR past or in the disruptions of reunification after 1990.
For younger voters, the AfD is capable of becoming something other than the political expression of an old grievance. It can become a future option. And that is the deeper break.
The radical right is not only selling nostalgia. It is selling the future.
I think this point is crucial, because the language of Germany’s democratic parties is still overwhelmingly organised around verbs of defence: protect democracy, defend institutions, preserve achievements, prevent regression.
All of that matters.
But politics cannot speak only about what we are afraid to lose. It also has to describe the place we want to reach. And for years, Germany’s democratic parties have struggled to tell that story loudly, simply and convincingly enough.
The AfD, by contrast, promises its supporters that they can “take the country back”, overturn the existing order and recover strength and control.
That is how a reactionary political project can be experienced by its supporters as renewal, change; even as the future.
But the resources available to Germany’s democrats should not be underestimated either.
This remains a country with a civil society capable of bringing millions onto the streets; strong courts; federal checks and balances; independent media; and a large social majority that still explicitly rejects far-right ideology.
Germany’s democratic core has not disappeared.
The problem is different. Democratic Germany is finding it increasingly difficult to explain to a growing number of its own citizens why it should also be their project for the future.
That is the first lesson I would draw from Saxony-Anhalt.
Anyone who continues to understand the AfD only as a protest vote - merely a symptom of dissatisfaction with something else - is misdiagnosing why the party has become so powerful.
Protest passes. Belonging endures.
But belonging is not fixed. It is politically created, cultivated and capable of taking root somewhere else again.
In the remaining five parts of this series, I will look at precisely that question.
What economic and cultural anxieties feed this sense of belonging? Is the CDU inadvertently strengthening the AfD’s political frame while trying to defeat it? What role do truth and trust in institutions play in this transformation? And what happens when a movement once dismissed as merely a “protest party” moves close enough to power that questions of democratic resilience are no longer theoretical?
Because the story emerging from Saxony-Anhalt is not simply the story of the AfD. It is the story of Germany’s democratic centre trying to define itself again.