Far-right AfD surges in polls in German state of Saxony-Anhalt: A test for nation’s core

Germany's post-war firewall against the far right is about to face its sharpest test yet. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is positioned for a historic victory in the September 6 state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, with polls putting the party above 40 per cent, well clear of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), languishing at around 25 per cent. Should the numbers hold, the AfD under Ulrich Siegmund could govern alone, becoming the first far-right party to hold power in Germany since the Second World War.

The party's rise rests on economic anxiety, demographic decay and the failures of the mainstream. Saxony-Anhalt, formerly part of East Germany, never fully recovered from the collapse of its lignite mining and chemical industries after reunification in 1990. Its population is now Germany's oldest, averaging 48.3 years, and the state has shed nearly a quarter of its residents since 1990 as the young departed in droves, leaving behind a skewed gender balance and a hollowed workforce. Even as locals left, the foreign national population more than doubled after 2015, hardening anti-immigration sentiment among those who stayed. None of this is entirely new terrain for the far right. In 1998, the extremist German People's Union won 12.9 per cent here, a reminder that the region's radical vote has deep roots.

What has changed is the strategy meant to contain it. The mainstream's cordon sanitaire, a blanket refusal to govern with the AfD, has backfired badly. By walling the party off entirely, mainstream politicians spared its voters any reckoning with the compromises of actual governance, letting the AfD radicalise without cost. The exclusion instead fed its central claim, that it alone stands outside a corrupt establishment cartel.

A win in Saxony-Anhalt would do more than hand the AfD a state government. Co-leader Alice Weidel already treats it as a lever against the CDU's national firewall, betting that continued mainstream refusal will eventually crack the conservatives and clear a path to federal power. The arithmetic gives her reason for confidence. The AfD leads national polling at 27 per cent, five points ahead of the CDU-CSU bloc.

The economic fallout of an AfD state government is expected to be severe. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned that such an outcome would drive away international investors. Siegmund's own pledges, deportations "from minute one" and baby bonuses to replace migrant labour, have already unsettled migrant-owned businesses, some of which have staged protests. At the same time, foreign workers weigh leaving the state altogether. Economists caution that any resulting exodus would gut sectors already dependent on foreign labour, health care most acutely, where clinic directors say hospitals would have to shut without their foreign-born doctors and nurses.

The security implications run deeper still. Germany's domestic intelligence service has already designated the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt a right-wing extremist organisation. Federal officials are particularly alarmed at the prospect of an AfD state government gaining access to classified material, given the party's close political affinity with Vladimir Putin's Russia. Intelligence passed to a Russia-friendly state administration could compromise military planning across the country and, by extension, European security more broadly.

Institutions are already adjusting. Officials are quietly preparing to restrict the routine flow of classified intelligence to Saxony-Anhalt's security services should the AfD take charge, and Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has said plainly that he will withhold classified information from an AfD-led government. The outgoing coalition has moved to change state law so the AfD cannot unilaterally block judicial appointments or the election of a parliamentary speaker. At the federal level, some legal experts continue to press for a formal party ban through the constitutional court, though such proceedings would be slow and politically fraught.

The political response, by contrast, is far less coherent. Some analysts argue that mainstream parties would do better to drop moral appeals and instead contest the AfD on hard interests, including through flexible minority governments that deny it the chance to claim victimhood. Others are simply drifting rightward. Sven Schulze, the CDU governor seeking re-election, has already borrowed from AfD rhetoric, calling for the deportation of terrorism suspects even where they hold German citizenship, because rejecting German culture forfeits the right to remain. Grassroots pushback has fared worse still. A senior police union official who cautioned officers against following illegal orders from a prospective AfD government was hounded into resignation after a coordinated smear campaign by far-right platforms.

A firewall built to keep the far right out of power may instead be remembered as the mechanism that let it in.