Why the AfD Wins

Three weeks before the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt went to the polls to elect a new legislature on September 6, Germany’s leading news magazine, Der Spiegel, ran a cover story with a mug shot of Ulrich Siegmund, lead candidate of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, under the legend “Germany’s Most Dangerous Man.” What made him so dangerous was not evident at first glance. Siegmund is young, untested, a bit of a glad-hander, and in some respects odd. He studied aromachology and marketing at university and takes a particular interest in the influence of smells on consumer behavior. He likes to ride around on old East German motorbikes. But that wasn’t what bothered Der Spiegel. They were more unsettled by the worry that a politician of the extreme right was about to take power in Germany—albeit at a local level—for the first time since Adolf Hitler. Naturally what constitutes the “extreme right” is in the eye of the beholder. The German state has an elaborate constitutional system meant to identify threats from within and snuff them out early. Devised in the late 1940s as Germany was re-establishing its state under Allied tutelage, it is sometimes called wehrhafte Demokratie, an expression coined in the 1930s by the sociologist Karl Loewenstein to describe a fortified democracy, a democracy that can fight back against those who would wreck it. Germany’s version requires parties to get 5 percent of the vote before they can take seats in the legislature, on the theory that there is something “fringy” about small parties that cannot be left to fester. It has a federal office for the defense of the constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) that is replicated in all states. Officers of the Verfassungsschutz can surveil the contacts and tap the phones of those who belong to parties deemed extremist. Based on evidence, they can give the party a classification that leaves it liable to banning by the federal constitutional court (Bundesverfassungsgericht). Less formally, Germany has developed a custom of partisan ostracism known as the “firewall” (Brandmauer) in which rival parties withhold cooperation and deny the parliamentary and social prerogatives to which an outcast party is customarily entitled. Germany is not the only Western society with taboos against dissident ideas, images, and rhetoric—but for eighty years, it has been the one in which those taboos are most powerfully defined, enforced, and protected from challenge. If the AfD really is the extremist party that Der Spiegel implies it is, then something has gone terribly wrong with Germany’s fortified democracy. For the AfD is now—by far—the most popular party in the country; 28 percent of voters nationwide say they would vote for it in the next national election, ahead of the 21 percent who would vote for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, which has (in coalition) ruled Germany almost continuously since Angela Merkel first won in 2005. In September, elections are being held in three eastern states where the AfD is popular: In Sachsen-Anhalt it was polling at 42 or 43 percent of the vote, a multiple of its closest rival. It was near the lead in Berlin and leading in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Young people in particular find little connection to the Altparteien—the “old parties,” as the CDU and its rivals the Social Democrats (SPD) are called. Sven Schülze, the CDU minister-president running against Siegmund, has only 24,000 followers on social media to Siegmund’s 1.7 million. The case that the AfD in this part of the country has a radical side is not without evidence: At least four prominent members of the Sachsen-Anhalt branch of the party, including a spokesman for Siegmund, took part in the Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend, a youth organization called neo-Nazi by the Verfassungsschutz until it was disbanded in 2009. (The organization’s name might be translated as “German Youth Loyal to the Homeland”; the word Heimat evokes ideas of ethnic exclusivity that over the last generation have been considered offensive in almost any context.) But 2009 is quite some time ago: Siegmund was a teenager at the time. (When the Berlin Wall fell, Germany’s Most Dangerous Man had not even been born.) If the AfD has fallen afoul of authorities, it is not as a nest of unreconstructed and revanchist mid-twentieth-century Nazis proposing to remilitarize the country and make war on its neighbors—at least, not solely. It is rather for protesting against certain elements of modern progressivism. Siegmund is particularly passionate about homeschooling. He is a skeptic about climate change. The Sachsen-Anhalt AfD was classified as “proven right-wing extremist” for its ethnic conception of German citizenship. The national party was also designated extremist when Social Democrats controlled the interior ministry in 2025, but this decision was criticized, not just in the AfD, as partisan. In February, the AfD was granted an injunction forbidding the government from using that designation until the case was resolved. Perhaps the problem is not that fortified democracy has outlived its effectiveness but that it has outlived its logic. It can lay a trap for those who wield it. In Sachsen-Anhalt, the old parties, even assuming they gain the votes, will be able to thwart the AfD only by, in effect, conspiring against it with what, to many Germans’ eyes, is an even more radical party: the Left Party, descended from the old Socialist Unity Party of the communist era, which increasingly focuses its wrath on Israel. That is what turned the Sachsen-Anhalt election into a vote on the integrity and viability of the political system. The last two decades have seen a succession of crises that have both worsened Germany’s prospects and reduced its autonomy—instability in the euro, uncontrollable immigration, COVID, war in Ukraine, a collapsing industrial model, and an increasingly unpredictable American protector. The AfD has risen to prominence because of these crises. Suspicion has arisen across society that the established parties are ill-equipped to deal with the country’s largest problems, and, worse, refuse to be frank and honest about them. Increasingly, thinking clearly about the future of Germany requires understanding the mind of the AfD. The party has been shaped by a critical decade and a half in which its preoccupations, some of them straightforwardly conservative, some genuinely disruptive and radical, have continually bumped up against an establishment consensus built for a different world than ours. This in turn has permitted Germans to discuss the AfD only in warped and euphemistic ways. Beginnings The AfD sprang into being as the result of pressures that built up after the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. The instability of borrowers’ collateral worldwide provoked a crisis of the euro. Funny that the euro should have caused such an eruption in Germany. Economists around French president François Mitterrand thought France would gain by eliminating the Deutsche Mark, the perennially strong currency that had allowed Germany to dominate the European economy. What a blunder they made. The euro trapped Europe’s indebted, import-dependent economies in a single market with Germany’s more efficient corporations, and individual countries no longer had their own currencies, which in the old days could be devalued to mitigate trade imbalances. Fifteen years ago, Germany held an unassailable position as the top Western European economy. It was an export powerhouse, built around the auto industry and a sturdy business model that needed only three things: cheap Russian energy, cheap central European labor, and the exponentially rising Chinese demand for cars and industrial machinery. There was a mystery, though. At a time when all seemed to be going well, voters were souring on the CDU and SPD—to the extent that those two parties essentially had to merge in three of the four coalitions through which Angela Merkel ruled Germany from 2005 to 2021. It seemed that whomever you voted for, you got the same parties in power. A diagnosis was offered by the former Berlin finance official Thilo Sarrazin in his book Deutschland schafft sich ab (“The Abolition of Germany”) in 2010. Sarrazin, a Social Democrat, argued that Germany was making a lot of bad investments, which over time would undermine its economy. The very worst of these was mass migration. Far from aiding the economy, it was building up invisible liabilities in the pension, education, and health systems. And part of the reason, the blunt Sarrazin added, with educational statistics at the ready, was that the migrants were generally not as bright as the natives whose places they were taking. The book sparked an unprecedented intellectual rage. It was as if all the books by the American social scientist Charles Murray—about welfare, intelligence, and inequality—had been published at once. So unused to frank discussions of such matters had Germany become that there was an immediate move to expel Sarrazin from the Social Democrats. The process took eleven years, but it confirmed Sarrazin’s overarching point: Germany’s biggest problem was the system it had devised for not talking about its problems. Though Sarrazin has never had anything to do with the AfD, his notion that threats to Germany’s well-being were being covered up by taboos is what called the party into being. The main grievances were already there, but easy to miss, when the AfD was founded in 2013. The trigger was an almost technocratic one: It looked as if heavily indebted Greece, unless it could find an outside guarantor for its debts, was going to spiral into bankruptcy and exit the euro. That guarantor could only be Germany. Most European Union economists in Brussels saw this as simple justice. But a group of Frankfurt economics professors and businesspeople were convinced that Germany could not afford a Greek bailout. They established the AfD