The AfD Earthquake in Saxony-Anhalt: Has Germany’s Political Centre Finally Broken?

By Matthew Parish

Wednesday 9 September 2026

Something extraordinary happened in Germany on Sunday, 6 September 2026. It was not merely another good election for the Alternative für Deutschland. Nor was it simply another bad election for Germany’s increasingly beleaguered governing parties. It was the moment at which the political architecture of the Federal Republic began to look as though it might no longer work.

In the Landtag election in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD won approximately 44 per cent of the vote, against only about 17 per cent for Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union. The AfD secured 39 of the 83 seats in the new Landtag, agonisingly short of an absolute majority. The CDU, which had governed Saxony-Anhalt since 2002, was reduced to 15 seats.

The precise percentages vary fractionally between the preliminary official count and subsequent reporting, but the political fact does not. The AfD roughly doubled its previous support. The CDU suffered a catastrophe. This was not an election result. It was an earthquake. And earthquakes reveal weaknesses in structures that previously appeared solid.

The eastern German question

The first temptation is to explain Saxony-Anhalt as an eastern German peculiarity. There is some truth in this. Saxony-Anhalt is one of Germany’s economically weakest Länder. It has suffered decades of demographic decline, emigration of younger and better-qualified people and comparatively low wages. The psychological consequences of German reunification have never entirely disappeared either. Many eastern Germans continue to believe that the institutions, assumptions and personnel of the old West German Federal Republic were simply extended eastwards after 1990 and that their own experiences were treated as provincial or embarrassing.

The AfD has become extraordinarily proficient at turning these diffuse resentments into votes. Yet the interesting feature of the 2026 election is that immigration does not appear to have been the dominant explanation for the result. Post-election polling reported by Deutsche Welle indicated that social security, peace in Europe and economic policy were particularly important considerations. Saxony-Anhalt itself has a relatively low foreign population, about nine per cent compared with approximately 15 per cent nationally. This matters.

It is comfortable for Germany’s political establishment to imagine the AfD voter as somebody obsessed with foreigners. If that were the whole explanation, mainstream politicians could condemn xenophobia, tighten immigration rules somewhat and wait for the fever to subside.

The evidence from Saxony-Anhalt suggests something considerably more difficult. People are voting AfD because they believe the political system does not work for them.

hat is a much more dangerous phenomenon.

The party of dissatisfaction

The AfD has gradually transformed itself from a protest party into something more formidable: a general receptacle for dissatisfaction with the Federal Republic. It can therefore accommodate several apparently contradictory constituencies. There are economic conservatives furious about taxation and bureaucracy. There are workers worried about pensions, wages and industrial decline. There are people who want immigration drastically reduced. There are eastern Germans nostalgic for cheap Russian energy and sceptical about supporting Ukraine. There are social conservatives hostile to Germany’s liberal cultural establishment. There are younger voters who simply despise all the established parties. And there are voters whose principal political belief is that Berlin does not listen to them.

This is why attempting to defeat the AfD by copying one or another of its policies has proved so difficult. Friedrich Merz tried precisely that. His political proposition was that Angela Merkel had permitted the CDU to drift too far towards the centre and that conservative voters had consequently escaped through the party’s right-hand door. Restore conservative positions on immigration, welfare, national identity and economic policy, Merz reasoned, and many AfD voters would come home. Instead the opposite has happened. The AfD has become stronger. That is because voters seldom purchase an imitation when the original is available.

Merz’s harder rhetoric may have legitimised some of the questions the AfD asks without persuading voters that the CDU has convincing answers. Meanwhile he has alienated portions of the centrist electorate that Merkel once captured so successfully. He has discovered the worst possible political equilibrium. He is too conservative for some of the centre and insufficiently radical for much of the right.

A referendum on Berlin

There was another ingredient in Saxony-Anhalt: Friedrich Merz himself. The election became partly a referendum on the Chancellor. According to post-election polling, 59 per cent of respondents believed the federal government deserved a political rebuke and 58 per cent said the CDU was the party with which they were most dissatisfied. Merz’s personal popularity has fallen to exceptionally low levels.

Reuters identified a cluster of grievances behind the AfD vote: bureaucracy, rising living costs, uncertainty over pensions and general economic insecurity. Merz’s proposed reforms, including changes to retirement arrangements and sick pay, have meanwhile created friction with his SPD coalition partners.

Here lies Merz’s fundamental problem. Germany probably does need painful economic reform. The industrial model upon which the Federal Republic prospered for decades has been badly damaged. Cheap Russian energy has disappeared. Chinese manufacturers have become formidable competitors. Germany’s motor industry faces a technological transition for which parts of it were poorly prepared. The population is ageing. The welfare state is expensive. Infrastructure has deteriorated. Regulation is cumbersome.

Merz therefore faces the oldest dilemma in democratic government. The country needs reforms that many voters do not want. And the benefits will arrive after the costs. The AfD has the luxury of promising that Germany can escape these unpleasant choices altogether.

Why the AfD campaign worked

There was also a more mundane reason for the victory. The AfD ran a good campaign. Its 35-year-old Spitzenkandidat Ulrich Siegmund presented himself not merely as an ideological firebrand but as a recognisably local politician. The party mobilised people who had previously abstained in unusually large numbers. It performed particularly strongly amongst workers and the self-employed and achieved substantial support across age groups. Deutsche Welle’s analysis suggests that almost two-thirds of workers voted AfD and that mobilisation of former non-voters was particularly important.

This should worry the established parties far more than another incremental increase in the AfD vote. The AfD is expanding the electorate available to it. For years Germany’s political establishment comforted itself with the thought that AfD support possessed a ceiling: perhaps 15 per cent nationally, perhaps 25 or 30 per cent in parts of the east. Saxony-Anhalt has just demonstrated that the ceiling may not exist. At almost 44 per cent, a supposedly untouchable party came within a handful of seats of governing a German Land alone.

The firewall paradox

Germany’s answer to the AfD has traditionally been the Brandmauer — the firewall. Every mainstream party refuses to form coalitions with it. The moral logic is understandable. Parts of the AfD have embraced rhetoric and personalities that sit far outside the conventions of post-war German democratic politics. The party has been subject to scrutiny by Germany’s domestic intelligence authorities. Germany, for obvious historical reasons, is unusually sensitive to political extremism.

Yet the firewall creates a mathematical problem. Imagine that the AfD regularly receives 35 or 40 per cent. Every other party must then combine against it. means conservatives, social democrats, Greens and sometimes parties further to the left must construct increasingly improbable coalitions whose principal common policy is that they are not the AfD.

Government consequently becomes less coherent. Voters become more dissatisfied. The AfD can then say that every other political party is really one establishment party. And its support rises again.

Saxony-Anhalt may therefore expose the paradox of the firewall: the stronger the AfD becomes, the more unnatural the coalitions necessary to exclude it become and the more powerful the AfD’s anti-establishment argument becomes.

The arrival of Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW makes the arithmetic even more interesting. BSW won five seats. Although it originates from the radical left, it overlaps with the AfD on hostility towards extensive immigration, scepticism about support for Ukraine and a desire for better relations with Moscow. Its representatives have shown greater willingness than Germany’s traditional parties to contemplate political dealings across the firewall.

The firewall may not collapse dramatically. It may simply develop holes.

Can this happen elsewhere?

Yes — but not everywhere and not immediately. The AfD’s greatest opportunities remain in eastern Germany, where the political, demographic and historical conditions that produced the Saxony-Anhalt result are strongest. Elections elsewhere in the east will therefore be watched obsessively. But it would be a serious error for western German politicians to conclude that this is merely an eastern disease.

National polling already places the AfD at or near the head of German politics. A current INSA poll cited after the Saxony-Anhalt election put the AfD at 28 per cent nationally against 20 per cent for the Union. The important question is therefore not whether the AfD can obtain 44 per cent in Bavaria or North Rhine-Westphalia tomorrow. It probably cannot. The question is whether the mechanism that produced 44 per cent in Saxony-Anhalt can operate elsewhere. It can.

Economic anxiety plus distrust of government plus cultural alienation plus unpopular reforms plus weak established parties is not a uniquely eastern German formula. It is a European formula. Versions of it can already be observed in France, Italy, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Germany was exceptional principally because its twentieth-century history made nationalist populism unusually difficult to legitimise. That exceptionalism is weakening.

And then there is Ukraine

There is an additional dimension to this election that Europeans outside Germany should not ignore. The AfD is profoundly sceptical of Germany’s support for Ukraine and advocates restoring relations with Russia. Its success therefore has geopolitical implications extending far beyond Magdeburg.

Merz has positioned Germany firmly within NATO and European support for Ukraine. He has refused to retreat from that position after the Saxony-Anhalt result. But democratic governments ultimately require democratic consent. If voters increasingly associate military expenditure abroad with deteriorating public services, expensive energy and insecurity at home, then support for Ukraine becomes vulnerable unless political leaders explain convincingly why European security and domestic prosperity are connected rather than competing priorities.

The Kremlin understands this perfectly. Russia does not necessarily have to defeat Ukraine militarily if she can persuade European electorates eventually to stop paying for Ukraine’s defence. Saxony-Anhalt therefore matters in Moscow as well as Berlin.

Is Merz finished?

Not yet. German Chancellors are deliberately difficult to remove. Article 67 of the Basic Law permits the Bundestag to dismiss a Chancellor only through a constructive vote of no confidence: parliament must simultaneously elect somebody else with an absolute majority. This mechanism was designed precisely to prevent the revolving-door governments that helped destroy the Weimar Republic.

Only once has a Chancellor been removed this way: Helmut Schmidt in 1982, when Helmut Kohl replaced him. So Merz cannot simply be toppled because his opinion polls are dreadful or because CDU politicians panic. Someone must construct an alternative parliamentary majority. Nevertheless, political death can precede constitutional death. And Merz is in serious danger. His problem is cumulative. He promised to reverse the AfD’s rise. The AfD has instead achieved its greatest triumph. He promised economic renewal. Voters remain anxious about the economy. He promised stronger leadership. His coalition with the SPD is increasingly fractious. He promised to restore conservative voters to the CDU. In Saxony-Anhalt the CDU was almost obliterated by the party to its right. Most damagingly, politicians within his own party must now ask a ruthless question: Will Friedrich Merz lead us to defeat? Once a governing party begins asking that question seriously, leadership becomes precarious.

The man waiting in Düsseldorf

If Merz falls, one name stands conspicuously above the others. Hendrik Wüst.

The Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia has been discussed for months as the Union’s Reservekanzler — its Chancellor in reserve. German reporting before the Saxony-Anhalt election already described Wüst as the most plausible replacement should Merz’s authority collapse.

Wüst possesses several advantages. He governs Germany’s most populous Land. He has executive experience. He is considerably younger than Merz. His political style is calmer and less abrasive. Most importantly, he governs successfully with the Greens. That last fact could become decisive. The arithmetic of German politics increasingly suggests that the Union may eventually have to choose between accommodation with the AfD and increasingly broad coalitions across the centre.

Wüst represents the second option. He could plausibly present himself as the leader capable of reconstructing a large democratic centre extending from moderate conservatives towards Greens and social democrats. That would amount to an implicit repudiation of the Merz experiment. Merz attempted to defeat the AfD by pulling the CDU towards the right. Wüst might attempt to defeat it by rebuilding the centre.

There are other conceivable candidates — Schleswig-Holstein’s Daniel Günther, Hesse’s Boris Rhein and figures within the federal CDU — but none presently combines Wüst’s political weight, territorial power base and relative acceptability to potential coalition partners. German political commentary increasingly treats him as the obvious alternative.

The crucial moment may be the North Rhine-Westphalia election scheduled for April 2027.

If Wüst wins convincingly while Merz continues losing elections elsewhere, the comparison may become unbearable for the Chancellor.

The deeper problem

Yet replacing Friedrich Merz with Hendrik Wüst would not solve Germany’s fundamental problem. Because Saxony-Anhalt was not principally about Friedrich Merz. It was about trust. The established parties of Germany have governed the country for decades upon a series of assumptions: that prosperity would gradually increase, that European integration was irreversible, that globalisation was broadly beneficial, that Russia could be contained or accommodated, that the United States would guarantee European security, that immigration could be managed and that the political centre would always command an overwhelming majority.

Almost every one of those assumptions is now contested. The AfD’s great political advantage is that it does not have to provide a coherent alternative to this disappearing world. It merely has to announce that the old world has failed. That is why Saxony-Anhalt should frighten Germany’s political establishment. Not because 44 per cent of voters suddenly became extremists. But because an extraordinary number of ordinary people decided that voting for a party ostracised by virtually the entire German establishment was preferable to voting for the establishment itself.

There is a profound distinction between those propositions. If German politicians confuse them, they may continue condemning the voters while congratulating themselves upon defending democracy. And the AfD will continue growing.

The German warning

For seventy years the Federal Republic has been one of history’s great political successes.

It converted dictatorship into liberal democracy, ruins into prosperity and aggressive nationalism into European leadership. Its politics became deliberately boring. Coalitions negotiated. Institutions worked. Extremes remained at the margins.

The success of that system eventually made Germans assume that it was permanent. Nothing political is permanent. Saxony-Anhalt has demonstrated that the mechanisms which protected the German centre can begin working against it. The firewall can turn exclusion into political glamour. Grand coalitions can make opposition more attractive. Economic reform can create precisely the insecurity that makes reform politically impossible. Friedrich

Merz may survive this crisis. He may even recover. But after 6 September 2026, Germany has entered a different political age. The question is no longer whether the AfD can win elections. It has. The question is whether Germany’s traditional parties can rediscover a convincing reason for people to vote for them. If they cannot, the identity of Friedrich Merz’s successor may eventually prove almost beside the point. Because the next Chancellor after that may come from somewhere Germany once believed impossible.