To block the Right, Germany’s establishment is teaming up with ex-communists
Washington Examiner · RC · trust 40/100
If the final polls are close to correct, Saxony-Anhalt will produce a startling result on Sunday. The Alternative for Germany , or AfD, could win 42% of the vote. That’s nearly twice the 22% projected for Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union, yet the CDU’s Sven Schulze could remain minister-president.
That outcome would be perfectly legal. Germany’s proportional system does not promise the largest party power without a parliamentary majority, but the arrangement required to keep the AfD out would expose the contradiction at the center of German politics .
The final ARD poll gives the AfD 42%, the CDU 22%, the Left 11%, the Social Democrats 8%, and the Greens 6%. The AfD’s 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund would still need a partner, and every party likely to enter the legislature has ruled one out. The CDU, SPD, and Greens would not have enough seats on their own, leaving Schulze dependent on the Left.
Merz has answered the surge by warning that an AfD victory could frighten off foreign investors. That concern deserves a hearing, especially in a state competing for factories and skilled workers. Yet warnings about what the AfD might do cannot substitute for an account of why the parties already governing have lost so much support.
Americans have heard this dispute before. Elon Musk declared that “only the AfD can save Germany.” Vice President JD Vance met AfD leader Alice Weidel and told the Munich Security Conference that democracy had “no room for firewalls.” President Donald Trump later celebrated Germany’s electoral shift as a rejection of a “no common sense agenda” on immigration and energy, while senior members of his administration protested official attempts to brand the AfD extremist.
Saxony-Anhalt will now test its criticism against political arithmetic. Luigi Pantisano, a national co-chairman of the Left, has left open the possibility of backing Schulze to stop an AfD government. The CDU’s formal position, however, rejects cooperation with both the AfD and the Left.
The symmetry was deliberate. The Left was created through a merger involving the successor to the Socialist Unity Party, which ruled communist East Germany until 1989. CDU officials are now drawing a careful distinction between cooperation and accepting votes on individual measures, language broad enough to support a minority government without calling it an alliance.
Voters appear to understand what the euphemism means. Only 32% favor a CDU-led government supported by the Left, while 59% oppose it. Asked to choose between an AfD-led and a CDU-led government, they split 42% to 41% in the AfD’s favor.
No parliamentary democracy must hand executive office to its largest party, and 42% is not 50%. The trouble begins when a cordon sanitaire becomes a substitute for persuasion. It allows parties that lost badly to preserve power without answering why voters abandoned them, then presents the maneuver as a defense of those same voters.
The firewall also strengthens the AfD’s most effective argument: that every established party ultimately belongs to one protective cartel. A conservative premier kept in office by the political heir of East Germany’s ruling communists would make that charge harder to dismiss. It would also leave the CDU sharing responsibility with parties whose policies its own voters rejected.
Saxony-Anhalt is a small former East German state, but the result will reach far beyond it. If Germany’s conservatives can preserve their firewall only by leaning on the far Left, the wall no longer separates the political margins from the center. It determines who governs.
René Rabeder is an Austrian journalist based in Vienna. He writes for Florida Politics , Germany’s Junge Freiheit and Statement , focusing on European politics and transatlantic affairs.
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