The AfD took 43.8 per cent of the vote, more than twice its share five years ago, while the governing Christian Democrats collapsed from 37.1 per cent to 17.2. The AfD won 38 of the state’s 41 constituency seats and finished first in the party vote everywhere except one district in Halle.
What had been described for years as a radical protest concentrated in the abandoned corners of the former East Germany is now the dominant political force across an entire state.
Even more remarkable was the turnout. In 2006, Sachsen-Anhalt recorded the lowest participation in any state election in the Federal Republic’s history: 44.4 per cent. This year it reached 77.8 per cent, the highest in the state’s history.
The AfD did not triumph because an exhausted electorate stayed home, leaving the field to a fanatical minority. It brought people back into politics. More than 150,000 of its new votes came from people who had not voted in 2021, with another 80,000 arriving from the CDU.
Liberal democracy held a festival of participation and discovered that the previously disengaged had turned up to vote against it.
The Sachsen-Anhalt election results have produced an arithmetical curiosity that neatly captures the predicament of the German political system. The AfD holds 39 seats in an 83-seat Landtag, three short of a majority. The five other represented parties collectively possess 44, but no coalition excluding both the AfD and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) can govern.
Maintaining Germany’s celebrated Brandmauer (“Firewall”) may require an arrangement stretching from the CDU through the Greens and Social Democrats to Die Linke and the BSW—an alliance whose only readily intelligible principle would be that none of its members is the party for which 44 per cent of the electorate voted.
Perhaps such a government could be assembled. Perhaps the BSW will permit AfD leader Ulrich Siegmund to become minister-president without formally joining his government. Perhaps some combination of tactical abstention, individual defection and parliamentary exhaustion will eventually produce a workable majority.
Every possible administration will be defined by its relationship to the party. And the party remains free to attribute every compromise, delay and failure to a political cartel conspiring to frustrate the popular will. Sachsen-Anhalt may not receive an AfD government, but it has already acquired an AfD political order.
The usual explanations arrived on schedule. Voters were angry. The economy was weak. Immigration had unsettled communities. Friedrich Merz was unpopular, the outgoing state government uninspiring, and the CDU unable to reproduce the personal authority of its former minister-president, Reiner Haseloff.
All of this is true, which is another way of saying that none of it is quite enough. People experiencing material hardship can have more than one target for their resentment. Economic insecurity does not come with a party label attached.
In a recent Substack post, Adam Tooze made the entirely apposite point that Sachsen-Anhalt was not always condemned to become a laboratory of the radical right. In the late 1990s, the SPD was the state’s largest party, governing with the Greens and parliamentary support from the Communist PDS.
The relevant history there—and other states of the former East Germany—is not one of unbroken nationalist continuity but of a progressive constituency first assembled and then destroyed.
Tooze builds on the work of Jana Hensel, who grew up in Leipzig under Communist rule, to show how people in the East have suffered since reunification. He locates the decisive break in the Hartz reforms imposed by Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democratic government after 2003. These didn’t just reduce benefits and increase pressure on the unemployed but also shattered confidence that they were equal partners with their counterparts in the former West Germany.
The immediate result of this realisation was demobilisation. People stopped expecting politics to represent them and eventually stopped participating in it altogether.
Sachsen-Anhalt’s economy had already endured the pulverisation of its industrial world after 1990, with its chemical plants, engineering works and rolling-stock factories stripped down, closed or absorbed into corporate structures headquartered elsewhere. Although jobs eventually returned, wealth, ownership, and authority did not.
Even now, eastern Germans possess approximately one-quarter of the wealth held by their western counterparts. The message delivered by Hartz IV was that the casualties of this transformation would henceforth be treated not as citizens to whom the republic owed restitution, but as defective competitors requiring additional discipline.
The AfD has reversed that withdrawal.
To be sure, the party has not restored the lost industrial society or redistributed ownership toward the East. Indeed, its economic program is well to the right of the parties that administered Hartz IV. But it has offered eastern Germans a compelling account of who belongs, who suffered, and who betrayed them.
Neoliberal reform recast the people it treated as redundant as the authentic nation. Their diminished power is explained not by the reorganisation of society under advanced capitalism but by the encroachments of migrants, welfare claimants, climate bureaucrats, feminists, queer people and metropolitan professionals.
This is why the consoling language of “protest voting” has become so threadbare. Fifty-five per cent of AfD voters told pollsters that they supported the party out of conviction; only 35 per cent described their vote principally as an expression of disappointment.
The party led among men and women, younger and older voters. It took 61 per cent of workers, 52 per cent of the self-employed and 46 per cent of salaried employees. Among men between 35 and 59, support approached 60 per cent.
These are not people momentarily kicking the furniture because the established parties have neglected them. Increasingly, they regard the AfD as their political home.
Tooze describes the social bargain the party offers as “nativist producerist deservism”, an awkward phrase for an ugly but coherent proposition. Society is divided vertically between parasitic elites and productive ordinary people, then horizontally between the native-born and the foreign.
Welfare is not necessarily abolished; it is morally reserved for those judged to have earned membership. The worker recovers dignity not by joining with others subject to capital’s power, but by distinguishing himself from the migrant, the dependent and the culturally alien. Universal solidarity is replaced by a hierarchy of deservingness, with the consolation that someone else can always be placed lower in the rankings.
This is not simply a deception laid over an innocent economic grievance. A worker who votes AfD may want higher wages and cheaper energy. But he is also likely to want refugees deported, gender roles restored and troublesome journalists humiliated. There is no reason to assume that the second set of desires is merely a confused expression of the first.
People can desire security for themselves and insecurity for others. They can prefer a society that assigns them a protected rank to one that promises emancipation while threatening to dissolve every boundary, identity, and livelihood.
This is where a materialist explanation of the AfD’s rise falls short. It is tempting to suppose that nobody really wants cruelty. Beneath the racism and fantasies of “remigration,” we imagine, lies an entirely reasonable demand for affordable housing, functioning hospitals and secure employment. Supply those things and the political ugliness will evaporate.
This argument is comforting because it preserves the picture of an essentially progressive electorate temporarily misled about its interests. It also refuses to hear what voters are saying.
The AfD gives its supporters something real. It gives them enemies upon whom otherwise diffuse frustrations can be concentrated. It gives them membership in a community whose authenticity is demonstrated by the contempt of respectable opinion. It lets them say what polite society forbids and experience the resulting scandal as evidence of personal courage.
Above all, the AfD offers its supporters a sense of agency. People unable to control investment, prices, employment or the distant institutions that administer their lives can at least imagine controlling borders, classrooms, cultural institutions and the bodies of people ranked beneath them.
Extremism is therefore not an embarrassing excess that the AfD will shed as it approaches power. It is a commitment device.
Politicians who speak of “remigration”, who attack Germany’s culture of historical remembrance, and who describe queer life as civilisational decay want to demonstrate that they cannot be absorbed into the Berlin Republic. Every denunciation by journalists, constitutional lawyers and the Verfassungsschutz verifies their outsider status. Siegmund’s attendance at the Potsdam gathering where mass deportation schemes were discussed did not end his career. It helped authenticate it.
Capitalism has prepared its own peculiar theatre for this performance. It addresses people constantly as sovereign choosers while depriving them of meaningful influence over the material organisation of their lives.
Consumption becomes the privileged language of personal truth: I choose, therefore I am. Yet the field of available choices has already been designed, priced, advertised and sorted by institutions the consumer never controls. Desire feels utterly intimate while bearing the fingerprints of an entire social machinery.
The radical right converts this consumer sovereignty into political authenticity.
Vote as you really feel. Say what you were told not to say. Offend the people who presume to instruct you. The AfD does not need to implant false desires into passive subjects; it organises existing desires and attaches them to a political project.
Resentment becomes belonging, punishment becomes agency, exclusion becomes security. The voter experiences the ballot not as submission to authoritarianism but as liberation from the requirement to pretend.
It’s crucial not to overlook the role of pleasure. There is pleasure in watching liberal institutions recoil, in seeing a politician insult a television interviewer, in imagining deportation officials finally doing what timid governments would not. There is pleasure in Donald Trump mocking European leaders and in Vladimir Putin humiliating the powers that administer sanctions, mandate climate transitions and lecture eastern Germans on the correct lessons of history.
Scandal is not collateral damage. It is part of the product.
This helps explain the AfD’s otherwise peculiar attachment to Moscow. Cheap Russian gas, eastern German memories and genuine fear of war all matter. But the affinity is deeper than an argument over energy supply.
Putin hates the same people they do. His Russia represents the possibility of capitalism without liberalism, private wealth without cosmopolitanism, elections without uncertainty, national grandeur without historical contrition, and patriarchal authority without apology.
Although appeasement is presented as peace, Russia’s victory would also represent the defeat of the European political order the AfD hopes to destroy at home.
Timothy Snyder argued a decade ago that Putin’s object was not to persuade the West of Russia’s superiority but to make Western politics resemble Russia’s. If Russia could not become a prosperous liberal democracy, liberal democracies could at least be rendered cynical, polarised and incapable of distinguishing freedom from spectacle.
This argument sometimes credited Moscow with powers it did not possess. Putin did not invent the Hartz reforms, reunification’s inequalities or the decay of European party politics. But his regime has become a model, a strategic beneficiary of the authoritarian desires those failures released.
The AfD’s victory in Sachsen-Anhalt has revived calls to defend Germany’s antifascist consensus. That consensus matters, particularly when a party employing former members of prohibited neo-Nazi organisations may soon influence the police, schools, judiciary and domestic intelligence service.
Unfortunately, moral prohibition can no longer substitute for political attachment. A republic cannot survive indefinitely by informing nearly half its citizens that their preferred party lies beyond the pale, especially when the remaining parties offer no shared project beyond maintaining the boundary.
The answer is not to abolish the boundary. Nor is it to imitate the AfD’s migration policies in the hope that voters will reward the copy instead of the original. It’s necessary to understand that the far right has built a community of fate where the democratic left allowed one to disintegrate.
An “alternative to the Alternative” must offer more than competent administration and improved benefits. It must provide agency, recognition and belonging without purchasing them through the subordination of someone else. That is a daunting task because emancipatory politics cannot assume that everyone secretly desires emancipation.
People can desire domination when it offers them a share in dominating others.
Sachsen-Anhalt is a core sample taken from the consciousness of late capitalism: legitimate needs for security and collective power fused with the pleasures of exclusion and revenge.
The AfD did not create those desires from nothing. It did something more consequential. It listened for them, gave them a language, and told the people who possessed them that they had been right all along.
Photograph courtesy of Matthias Berg. Published under a Creative Commons license.
