After the AfD’s Election Victory, Germany’s Centrist Parties Face the Real Test

Germany’s political center has reached a point where its long-trusted firewall against the far right may no longer be enough. The Alternative for Germany won almost 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, opening the possibility that an extremist party could again govern at state level, 80 years after the Nazi era.

There are ways to put the result into perspective. Saxony-Anhalt has “only” 2.1 million residents, compared with Germany’s total population of 83.5 million. The AfD won democratically, failed to secure an absolute majority and will need coalition partners. Security services classify the party as far right, but not every voter who supported it shares that identity.

Yet those qualifications, the article argues, miss the larger issue. Postwar Germany built safeguards to prevent the far right from returning to power. Centrist parties relied for too long on the Brandmauer, an unwritten agreement not to cooperate with the far right, even as successive elections showed that the arrangement was not stopping the AfD’s advance.

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Anything is possible.

The article says the center has also failed by copying the radical right’s hard-line language on migration. Voters, it argues, choose the original. Attempts to hide party identity, such as CDU candidates using extremely small party logos to avoid association with the unpopular Chancellor Friedrich Merz, have not worked either. Nor has warning of disaster if the AfD wins, without offering an equally convincing political story or matching the optimism of its slogan, “Anything is possible.”

It remains unclear whether the AfD can form a state government. Its proposals include separate classes for children seeking asylum and children with disabilities, abolishing public broadcasting, and requiring cultural institutions to declare their pro-German character. In Thuringia, the AfD also won two years ago but remained in opposition after the CDU, SPD and BSW excluded it with the support of Die Linke. Even if that happens again, the article warns, the momentum would still belong to the AfD. Further state elections are approaching, including in Berlin, and the party’s pro-Russian stance could have implications for the Netherlands, Germany’s key economic partner and defence partner. A warning at the Haus der Weimarer Republik states that democracy is vulnerable, even when protected by a strong constitution.

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Democracy is neither unconditional nor guaranteed under all circumstances. Every democracy is vulnerable, even if it rests on a good constitution.