The notable point arising from Germany’s election is that tactical sophistication has replaced raw grievance politics. The AfD didn’t just run on immigration. It ran on Chancellor Merz’s unpopularity, positioning itself as the only genuine alternative to an exhausted status quo.
On Sunday, in the eastern German state of Saxony Anhalt, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) did something no far-right party has done in that country since the fall of Hitler’s Third Reich: it won a state election outright, coming within a handful of seats of an absolute majority. The AfD won just under 44 per cent of the vote, more than double its previous showing and the strongest performance by a far-right party in any German state election in the post-war era. The party fell just short of the seats needed to govern alone, but co-leader Alice Weidel wasted no time declaring that the result “should trigger federal elections before Christmas”.
Although those in the political centre and centreright in Germany want to treat this result as a regional anomaly, it isn’t. In fact, it’s the clearest example yet of a trend line that has been climbing across the continent for a decade. The clear and present danger is that Germany’s political establishment, like those in France, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria and Sweden before it, is transparently running out of room to dismiss the far right as fringe noise. The victory in Magdeburg is not the end of a story. It’s the beginning of a more volatile chapter in European politics, one whose implications will reshape the architecture of the EU itself.
Consider Germany’s own trajectory. In the federal election in February 2025, the AfD posted its highest-ever national result and finished second, forcing Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU into an uneasy governing position. State elections since then have put the AfD at around 20 per cent; respectable, but nothing compared to what just happened in Magdeburg. Going from a strong second-place finish to an outright majority in eighteen months is not a steady drift; it’s an acceleration.
The AfD is also no longer confined to the east, where it’s been strongest. It has spent two years normalising itself in western Germany too, moving from protest party to a fixture the mainstream can no longer freeze out through a cordon sanitaire alone. A nation that built its post-war identity on atonement now faces the real prospect of a far-right party as a coalition partner in multiple state parliaments by 2027.
The same phenomenon is repeated elsewhere. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally remains the largest bloc in France’s National Assembly, posting the strongest results any French nationalist party has achieved since the Vichy era. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, whose party has roots in post-fascist politics, has governed the country since 2022 without any serious threat to her coalition. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ PVV party topped the polls in November 2023, creating a major political upset. Sweden’s right-wing populist Democrats prop up that country’s government. Austria’s Freedom Party won a national election outright for the first time in its history.
This is not a list of six unrelated national stories; it is one European story told six times, and Saxony-Anhalt is its latest, most alarming chapter.
So why does this keep happening, and why is it dangerous? The simple answer is that in all countries it’s not a protest vote that will evaporate. Three durable forces are driving it, and none show signs of reversing. The first is migration, which remains the single most electorally potent issue on the continent. Mainstream parties have offered little beyond managerial reassurance, while the far right offers stark clarity, and clarity wins elections when people feel unheard.
Surging asylum applications and spill-over from conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have kept the issue at a fever pitch, and establishment fixes have failed to convince sceptical electorates. Then there’s economic resentment, which clearly underlies the cultural anger. Eastern Germany still lags the west economically more than three decades after reunification. Deindustrialisation and a sense of being governed by a distant elite have created fertile ground for a party claiming to speak for the “left behind”. The same resentment festers in France’s post-industrial north and Italy’s south, where austerity has hollowed out public services. Finally, tight monetary policy is compounding the pain for small businesses in these peripheral regions, turning the EU’s own economic governance into a target.
The notable point arising from Germany’s election is that tactical sophistication has replaced raw grievance politics. The AfD didn’t just run on immigration. It ran on Chancellor Merz’s unpopularity, positioning itself as the only genuine alternative to an exhausted status quo, while using social media to bypass traditional gatekeepers, a tactic refined from Budapest to Rome. The playbook is now standardised and exportable: attack Brussels, promise sovereignty, exploit cultural anxiety, and claim the mantle of the authentic working class. That makes it far more durable, and far more dangerous, than a passing wave of anger.
For years, Germany’s mainstream parties relied on the Brandmauer, the “firewall” of refusing to govern with the AfD, assuming isolation would eventually starve the party of relevance. Saxony-Anhalt will in all likelihood end that assumption. When a party wins 44 per cent of a state vote, isolating it doesn’t shrink its base; it reinforces the AfD’s own narrative that the establishment fears letting voters’ real preferences into government. Every added point of vote share turns the firewall from a democratic safeguard into a democratic liability.
This is the same dynamic that already broke cordons in Italy and the Netherlands, where the parties that eventually negotiated with the far right did so from a position of far greater weakness than they would have had a decade earlier. Germany’s CDU now faces an agonising choice on a compressed timeline: either keep the firewall and risk becoming a permanent opposition party in the east, or break it and risk civil war within its own ranks and the collapse of its centrist identity. Either path carries existential risk, and a decision will likely be forced before the next federal election.
The danger radiates well beyond German domestic politics, as it could lead to a chain reaction across the EU. The EU’s machinery depends on consensus among member states on fiscal policy, foreign affairs and the rule of law. A German chancellor trapped in a weak, diminished coalition would fracture the Franco-German axis that has driven European integration for decades. For its part, France, wrestling with its own nationalist insurgency, would have no reliable partner to push deeper integration, banking union or common defence. The result could be a paralysed Brussels, unable to respond to an assertive China, an unpredictable United States or a revanchist Russia.
More alarming still are the AfD’s documented sympathies towards Moscow. A party that has called for lifting sanctions on Russia, opposed arms deliveries to Ukraine and questioned Germany’s commitment to NATO is now within reach of real power. An AfD role in a state or federal government could mean vetoed military aid packages, an undermined Bundeswehr modernisation effort and effectively a fifth column inside NATO’s most important European member.
That would embolden a delighted Vladimir Putin, who has long sought to fracture European unity, and would also send a chilling signal to the Baltic states and Poland, both of which depend on German leadership for their own security. Saxony-Anhalt is therefore not just a domestic upset; it is a geostrategic crack in the Western alliance and an economic tinderbox.
Beneath the politics, economic strain is stoking the fire. Germany faces expensive energy, declining exports to China and a costly transition to electric vehicles. The AfD has framed the green transition as an elitist project destroying jobs in the automotive and chemical sectors, a message that landed hard in chemical-industry-heavy Saxony Anhalt. As new EU fiscal rules force tighter budgets, the odds of recession across Europe in 2026 are rising, and far-right parties across the continent are positioned to exploit the downturn, blaming Brussels and migration for stagnant wages and housing shortages. Every downbeat forecast becomes fresh proof, in their telling, that the establishment has failed, pushing more voters towards the extremes.
None of this means fascism is about to sweep the continent, and it would be irresponsible to claim otherwise. But it is no longer credible to treat far-right success as a series of disconnected national curiosities. A party with documented Kremlin-friendly sympathies just came within striking distance of governing a German state for the first time since 1945, in the same political moment that Le Pen dominates the French opposition, Meloni governs comfortably in Rome, and nationalist parties hold real power from Vienna to Stockholm. The throughline is migration anxiety, economic dislocation and continent-wide exhaustion with politics-as-usual, and none of the conditions driving it show signs of resolving.
Saxony-Anhalt is a state election in a country of sixteen states, but it is also a preview. If Germany’s largest, most institutionally stable democracy can produce this result, the question for the rest of Europe is no longer whether the far right’s rise is real; it’s how much further it can go before mainstream parties stop treating each recordbreaking result as a shock and start treating it as the baseline. With German federal elections looming, and 2027 European Parliament elections shaping up as a referendum on the EU project itself, the containment strategy has failed and the firewalls are cracking. The wave that began as a trickle on Europe’s margins is now sweeping through its heart, and the window for the mainstream to adapt before it runs out of ground to stand on is closing fast.
*John Dobson is a former British diplomat who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.
