Let’s start with the good news. The two former East German states where right-wing extremists and populists won a third of the vote in elections this weekend have a combined population of six million, which is not even 8 per cent of the overall German population. Their alarming success—particularly the Alternative for Germany (AfD)’s first-place finish in Thuringia—is not representative of the country as a whole.
This is where the good news ends though. In Thuringia—where the AfD is led by Björn Höcke, who has twice been found guilty by a German court of purposely employing Nazi rhetoric—the party won a third of the vote. This will allow it to block critical legislation that requires the assent of two-thirds of legislators, including changes to the state’s constitution and the election of judges. In Saxony, the AfD secured around 31 per cent. In both states, two of the parties of the federal coalition government—the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens—did not even reach a combined 10 per cent share.
The result was expected, but it will still send shockwaves far into the rest of Germany, further paralysing the already dysfunctional government in Berlin and fundamentally changing the national political debate. Domestic intelligence agencies monitoring anti-constitutional groups in both states have officially classified the AfD’s local branches as extremist organisations that aim to undermine German democracy. The party’s victory brings an end to the time when the vast majority of citizens took it for granted that liberal democracy was the unquestioned foundation of the German Republic.
The question now is how the centre responds. After three people were stabbed to death in the western city of Solingen ten days ago, allegedly by a Syrian asylum seeker, the AfD’s signature topic of migration rose to the top of the agenda. The national government failed to calm an increasingly hysterical debate, and the chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD appeared almost relieved to hold onto a meagre 6 per cent in Thuringia and 7 per cent in Saxony, which allows it to at least remain in both local parliaments. The only centrist survivor is the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which narrowly held onto first place in Saxony and second in Thuringia. It will now have the difficult task of forming a government without the AfD, after confirming on Sunday night that its “firewall” against the party—the promise it would not negotiate with the far right—still stands.
However, the CDU is in danger of learning the wrong lesson from its survival. Its national leader Friedrich Merz led a campaign that closely resembled the UK Conservative party’s self-destructive strategy. Merz used the Solingen tragedy to attack the national government, pandering to the far right instead of standing up to it. Merz equated criminality and terror with immigration. He made kneejerk and far-reaching demands, notably for the government to declare a national emergency, stop the admission of refugees and permanently reinstall checks at the German border—illegal under EU-Schengen laws.
By offering no real solutions—only performative reactions—he fed straight into the narrative which has helped the AfD thrive in the East: that the German state is a weak and failing one, incapable of solving people’s problems. If Merz runs his party’s campaign for next year’s general election in the same way, expect the AfD to grow further.
The far right’s success seems confined to East Germany—for now. In no other region are far-right parties as deeply rooted in the local political culture. Yet the surge of anti-democratic movements is not solely an East German phenomenon. In the West, extremists and their potential voters are still on the fringes, but they are increasingly shaping events by having gained support in the East.
One of the most-read East German historians today, Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, describes this phenomenon in powerful terms, going as far as to speak of an East German virus that is spreading into the West. Problems were created, he says, by the sudden and insensitive way that the economy of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was taken over by the old West after 1989. But this is by no means a sufficient explanation for the predominance of authoritarian thinking in the East, especially as most of those states are now doing rather well economically. For him, the real reason lies deeper, as he explains in his latest book, Freedom Shock.
When the wall came down, the overwhelming majority of civilians in the former GDR wanted to join the Deutsche mark (DM) as soon as possible, understandably longing for instant wealth and prosperity. But they confused this desire with the more laborious concept of democracy, he says. Freedom, in a liberal democracy, generally comes at a price. While liberal democracy provides for clear rules, laws and regulations, the social contract must be constantly renegotiated.
Kowalczuk argues that most people who came out of the communist dictatorship did not realise the difference between the state and society, as for them there was none before 1989. “Nobody taught the East Germans that life in freedom is far more strenuous than in a dictatorship. You constantly have to make decisions, say ‘I’, get involved in your own affairs. In a dictatorship, the state takes care of all that. The rules were simple and straightforward: just do what you’re told! And ‘you’ is the state.” Kowalczuk calls this phenomenon the “Diktaturschädigung”, meaning the mental damage that life in a dictatorship does to its citizens: a state of mind that was never properly dismantled and that makes its citizens particularly prone to romanticising the authoritarian past as a “safer time”, while pushing aside the brutality and violence the East German regime imposed on its citizens.
This romanticisation is precisely where the AfD and the second big winner of this weekend’s elections, Sahra Wagenknecht’s Alliance (BSW), come in. Ahead of the election, some thought her new party would eat into the AfD’s vote share. Instead, the unusually charismatic Wagenknecht, the rising star of German populism, managed to secure double-digit results in both states. The BSW has turned out to be a resentment machine, normalising anti-democratic narratives and paving the way for far-right thinking. Wagenknecht herself will play an important role in any further negotiations on the CDU forming coalition governments in these states.
While the AfD and BSW differ in a number of ways, they are united on one central point: both strive for a strong, authoritarian state that will contain, patronise and homogenise society. The logical consequence is that they both want to destroy the EU and the concept of liberal democracy, and more or less openly support Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
While the AfD’s Höcke has repeatedly echoed the language of the Third Reich, the ostensibly leftist Wagenknecht also draws on far-right topics and tropes to create a toxic brew of slogans that directly taps into the specific frustrations of East Germans. One of the very few who joined the Socialist Unity Party (SED) after the wall came down, she offers hard-right policies on immigration and culture, left-wing socialism for domestic politics, and an added shot of the anti-American and anti-Nato messaging which was so familiar in the GDR.
For Wagenknecht, it was Nato who provoked Putin into invading Ukraine, and she has made the immediate ending of German military support for Ukraine a precondition for coalition talks with any mainstream party. Her ultimate goal is the extrication of Germany from its western alliances and a return to a “peaceful coexistence” with Russia, an idea that is as dangerous and impossible as the other imaginative work of her nostalgic voters—the reinvention of the GDR as the cosy, peaceful “safer” state it never was.
This is the woman with whom the CDU now must cooperate or even form a government. The fractured results will make any other coalition building in both Thuringia and Saxony extremely difficult. It may take weeks or even months for a compromise to be reached, and in that time far-right topics and tropes will dominate the news agenda, while the national government’s lacklustre support for arming Ukraine may weaken further. With next year’s national election looming, these debates are likely to become even more heated and irrational.
Yes, the good news is that the AfD will not be part of any government, not even on a regional level, because German mainstream parties are maintaining their cordon sanitaire around the far right. But the bitter truth is also that the centre didn’t hold. In Thuringia, the state where the Nazis had their first electoral breakthrough in 1932, the AfD achieved its goal of winning more than 30 per cent of the vote.
Days before the election, Höcke made it very clear that he is coming for the mainstream “cartel parties” who are working to “replace the German people” with a multicultural society. On Sunday night, he ranted against the “stupid firewall”, but he knows it will be much easier for him to achieve his goal from the sidelines.
With a dysfunctional government in Berlin and the conservative CDU seemingly oblivious to the lessons from its sister party in the UK, the far right’s victory in East Germany must not be underestimated. From now on they will govern, even if they won’t.
