Is the victory of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt a straw in the wind?
Those hoping and those fearing that it and other right-wing insurgent parties may be capable of supplanting their mainstream rivals are in agreement on one thing: the result is extremely important.
The radical AfD won 43.8 per cent of the vote, to the conservative CDU’s 17.2 per cent. The AfD themselves declared it a “dream result”, which they intend to use as a springboard to achieve 40 per cent of the vote countrywide in the next national election in 2029.
Germany’s embattled centre-right Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who leads the CDU, said he was “deeply shocked” and that the election ruled out any return to “business as usual”.
The prospect of the radical right gaining power comes, of course, with strong historical resonance in Germany. But the AfD are not the only nationalist party hoping to take power in Europe.
In France, the National Rally is targeting the 2027 presidential election. The party’s president, Jordan Bardella, made an appearance at Reform UK’s conference in Birmingham last week, illustrating the degree to which such parties aid one another.
Of course, winning a regional election is not a guarantee that one will win at national level. Reform’s own triumphs in recent local elections have not handed the party the inexorable rise in the opinion polls that it originally seemed to expect.
Our own experience in Britain suggests that being the front-runner – as the AfD now are in German opinion polls – also has downsides, not least the level of scrutiny that would-be government status attracts.
What’s more, gaining control locally muddies a party’s control over its own reputation. There’s a gulf between the relative ease of communicating how much better things would be if you were in charge and the aggravating complexity of actually running, say, an English county or a German state. For the AfD, the fact that they only just fell short of an outright majority in Saxony-Anhalt may yet require them to strike a tricky alliance with the BSW (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht) an anti-capitalist party of the left which shares similar views on immigration and Russia.
Nonetheless, it would be foolhardy to underestimate the political earthquake that a surge such as the AfD’s represents. Such breakthroughs are very hard to achieve, and voters do not easily change their minds so fundamentally. These are genuinely historic shifts in the political landscape.
It would be more foolish still to assume that, just because Nigel Farage is currently embattled, there is any sort of inevitability that an insurgency gaining a lead in the polls must in due course simmer down, either here or in Germany. It can happen, but there’s no guarantee that it will.
So we should consider the possibility that today’s straws in the wind may eventually become political reality. What would it mean for the wider world if the AfD did indeed unseat the old left/right dichotomy of the SPD and the CDU-CSU?
The most consequential impact would be on Nato, and the wider West’s solidarity in support of Ukraine’s fight for freedom against Russia.
Tino Chrupalla, one of the AfD’s two co-leaders, has in the past floated the prospect of Germany withdrawing from Nato entirely, and repeated familiar Kremlin-friendly talking points about the alliance somehow being to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. When challenged on his views last year, he replied: “[Vladimir Putin] hasn’t done anything to me. I don’t currently see any danger to Germany from Russia.”
Many German voters disagree and share understandable concerns about Putin’s threat to national and European security. But it’s also true that Germany was the major European power most visibly reluctant to come to Ukraine’s aid back in 2022. An AfD government might find it challenging to block assistance for Kyiv outright, but it is easy to imagine it successfully dragging its feet and leveraging a seat at the Nato and EU top table to water down any further action.
An AfD government in Berlin would amount to a direct channel for Putin into the heart of Europe’s defences. Whether knowingly or unwittingly, they would be the Kremlin’s dream: a weak point in Western solidarity at a vital time in the parallel hot and cold wars that Russia is waging against the democracies of Europe.
Those watching these developments are not confined to AfD fellow travellers or concerned liberals. To the east, other Nato and EU member states are also observing German political developments closely, with a healthy degree of concern.
For countries which suffered for decades under Russian occupation and Soviet oppression, and which also have a painful history when it comes to trusting their western neighbours, it’s obvious why the prospect of adding an unreliable – or actively isolationist – Germany to an unreliable United States is worrying.
Leading the way is Poland, which has tripled its defence spending since 2022 and now spends the highest proportion of GDP on defence of any Nato member state. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have all implemented a surge in their defence spending in the same period and have been developing increasingly sophisticated defences against cyber warfare and grey-zone attacks. A few days ago, Finland conducted the largest civil defence exercise seen in Europe since the Second World War.
This began in response to the threat posed by Russia itself and has been further encouraged by threats from Donald Trump’s White House to pull the rug out from under Nato altogether. The prospect of an AfD government in Berlin will only drive these initiatives further.
Those nations that prize their hard-won independence and have living memories of life under occupation have no intention of once more being overrun by an aggressor from the east or abandoned by a former friend in the west. If they can’t rely on Nato, they intend to fight alone.
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