News has come from Germany that might upset liberal and democratic forces across the world. The Far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has swept the polls in the recent regional election of Saxony-Anhalt, inflicting a crushing defeat on the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The results seem to have enormously wide ramifications that experts are not taking them lightly as merely a regional affair. The ruling party of Germany has caved in before the onslaught of a xenophobic, nationalist platform that has dealt a blow to a system of governance built on repudiating the politics of the extremes as is being practiced by the Far-Right formations and fostering consensus. The irony is that the result was expected, but what has taken everyone by surprise is its magnitude. By winning around 44 per cent of the vote in the Saxony-Anhalt regional elections, the Far-Right AfD more than doubled its 2021 tally.
The conservative CDU fell to around 17 per cent, half its score from five years ago. This is for the first time since the end of World War II that a Far-Right party won a regional election in Germany. The results have come as a shock, particularly for Merz. When he ran for the CDU presidency in 2018, he projected himself as a man confident and capable of halving the AfD’s score. Eight years later, the Far-Right rakes in around 28 per cent nationally while the CDU barely crossed 20 per cent. Such an eventuality is all the more puzzling since Merz has taken much more conservative positions than during Angela Merkel’s era. He even significantly tightened Germany’s migration policy since being elected chancellor in May 2025. These are crucial components of Far-Right politics. But, strangely, the people of Germany are not much convinced as is evident from the fact that Merz has not been able to halt the Far-Right’s momentum. The saving grace for the CDU is that the AfD fell short of an outright majority and could not govern alone. But it is all set to put intense pressure on Germany’s other political parties’ long-standing refusal to cooperate with the Far-Right, even though these parties are in the horns of a dilemma. Cooperating with the AfD would mark a rupture for the party of Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Merkel.
For, unlike other Far-Right parties in Europe, the AfD had never sought to soften its image or move toward the mainstream. Its platform for Saxony-Anhalt proposes, among other things, abolishing the fundamental right to asylum, excluding students with disabilities and refugee children from schools, promoting the traditional family, consisting of the father, mother and as many children as possible and revising history education to glorify Nazism. Two very globally important persons, however, are expected to be happy with the outcome – Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump. Putin is keen on seeing the growth of a party in Germany that is ready, like the AfD, to lift sanctions against Moscow, stop supporting Kyiv and resume buying Russian gas. As for Trump, he continually denounces the ostracism of European nationalist right-wing parties and portrays the AfD as a force unfairly kept from power.
The fact that Saxony-Anhalt accounts for only 2.5 per cent of Germany’s population cannot be any consolation for the established parties in Germany and liberal forces of Europe. When a party of this nature gains nearly half the votes on the basis of a radical, xenophobic, and neo nazi nationalist program, while the main governing party collapses, it cannot be dismissed as an aberration or a local development. It testifies to changing times when the postwar political model of Germany based on rejecting the extremes and safeguarding consensus, is tottering. This sends worrying signals for the rest of the world.
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