At its inception, the Federal Republic was to be a new type of Germany. Its novelty did not lie primarily in its institutional design, for Germans had been schooled in democracy under the empire and had known a republican form of government under Weimar, although it was hoped that the new Basic Law would improve upon the dissatisfactory experiences of these earlier regimes. No, this time, for the first time ever, the ‘Third Germany’ was to have its say; the Germany of — to paraphrase Norman Stone — moth-eaten patchworks of miniature duchies, dusty landgraviates, and sovereign archbishoprics skirting the Rhine, with historic British and French allies like Hannover and Bavaria and a handful of Hanseatic free cities thrown in to provide ballast. This new state was to be mercantile, undogmatically Catholic, and supine towards the great powers in the way that the free-trading Rhineland traditionally had been.
Unlike the Kaiserreich, a hotbed of experimentation in progressive and revolutionary politics of every kind, the new Germany was to be conservative. Whereas the Soviets had occupied Prussia and Saxony, in which the workers’ movement was traditionally strong, the Federal Republic’s territory overlapped with those areas that had been the bedrock of the Catholic Centre Party and its localist affiliates. These tendencies to mercantile internationalism in foreign policy and an internal resistance to change have shaped the Federal Republic, a kind of Saudi Arabia of mid-century liberal Catholicism, down to the present day.
What, then, of Germanies one and two? The post-war settlement decisively removed Austria from the equation while leaving the problem of Prussia open. The Basic Law was meant to be a provisional document (hence why it is called ‘Basic Law’ and not ‘Constitution’); the majority opinion among its framers was that the German Reich continued to exist, and that adopting a new constitution would require a sovereign decision by the German people as a whole, to be taken once civil authority was restored over the entire German territory. This option, having been passed up at reunification in 1990 (when the Federal Republic permanently relinquished its territorial claims east of the Oder-Neisse line), still remains available under the Basic Law’s controversial yet unambiguous Article 146 — that it was not taken was partly due to considerations of realpolitik (every schoolchild in Germany will doubtless have heard the phrase ‘Kohl’s historic window of time’ a thousand times before), but also because 45 years of constitutional limbo had given the Wessies a smug pride in ‘the achievements of our Basic Law’, which was believed sufficient to ‘socialise’ the easterners into good, democratic citizens.
This was an error. The transposition of Rhenish institutions was widely felt as an imposition in the East, a grievance made more salient by the fact that those same institutions gave maximal political expression to regional particularities. Prussia’s barren, sandy fields had never produced a politically charged regionalism in the way that the Rhineland, Bavaria, or Hannover had (for these had invariably been directed against the Prussian central authority). Saxon protest had traditionally been social democratic and only secondarily regionalist, while four decades of separation had only hardened the these regions’ German nationalist orientation (Saxony is a somewhat more complex story, having since produced a small but moderately popular separatist movement). Thus, from early on, Prussia braced itself for a role it had played before: a redoubt for various radical currents to gather the strength from which to conquer the rest of the country. In the thirty six years since reunification, eastern dissent from the Federal Republic has taken the form of nationally oriented political parties: the Left (an amalgamation of the old ruling Socialist Unity Party and dissident elements of the western Social Democrats) and the Alternative for Germany, the latter of which appears poised to form government for the first time in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Saxony-Anhalt is an afterthought for most Germans. The country’s major transport arteries largely pass it by, while the monotony of its landscape means few even notice when they’re there. Germany’s federal states usually possess some historical, cultural, or geographical coherence that provides them a ready-made local identity; Saxony-Anhalt is a wholly artificial construct, cobbled together after 1945 from the old Prussian Province of Saxony (itself a post-Napoleonic amalgamation of older Prussian territories and annexations from the Saxon Kingdom) and the independent Duchy of Anhalt. Largely rural, and with no larger cities to speak of than Magdeburg and Halle, it encompasses a varied terrain from the Harz Mountains in the south, the fertile soil of the Magdeburger Börde in the centre, and the arid Altmark in the north. These were the leftover screws and bolts that wouldn’t fit anywhere else when Germany was put together from the flatpack, and combined with the featurelessness of the terrain and the severity of the state’s post-1990 depopulation (which has seen it lose a quarter of its communist-era inhabitants, mostly younger workers), this gives the world here a feeling of deracination deeper and more disorientating than the shiniest Chinese train station waiting hall.
Nevertheless, the separate lands that today make up Saxony-Anhalt have a rich history intimately linked with the development of the German state. The Elbe and the Saale, which converge just south of the capital at Magdeburg, formed the medieval boundary between Germanic and Slavic areas of settlement, which can still be seen today in the region’s toponyms. More than once in its medieval history this region would be the staging point for German eastwards expansion, whether as military conquest or as a diffusion of institutions, such as the ‘Magdeburg Law’ widely adopted throughout Eastern Europe. The Altmark or ‘Old March’ which lies north of Magdeburg and whose name hints at its old colonial function, was the oldest part of the Margraviate of Brandenburg, which, under the Hohenzollern dynasty, was merged with Prussia and eventually birthed the Kaiserreich. As everyone knows, the man responsible for this piece of statecraft was the Prussian Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, born in Schönhausen in the Altmark — other local luminaries include Luther, Nietzsche, Bach, Catherine the Great of Russia, Winckelmann, and many others whom it would take up too much space here to list. Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s leader in the state, is another Altmark native, and there is something apt, if not downright romantic, in this bastion of Prussiandom once again discharging its old role as the vanguard of the German nation.
Of course, this illustrious history only goes so far to explain the AfD’s remarkable strength in Saxony-Anhalt. A cursory glance at the state’s political economy suffices to explain the potency of anti-establishment sentiment here. Saxony-Anhalt is already a poor state, its GDP per capita is the lowest in the country, but there was a time when things were otherwise. From the late 19th century onwards, the state’s so-called ‘Chemical Triangle’ (a small portion of which is located in the neighbouring state of Saxony) was a centre of the German chemical industry; though its output is modest in comparison with the great Rhine-Ruhr chemical conglomerates today, it still accounts for roughly 16% of German chemical production and ~7% of sectoral turnover. Production here is dominated by basic chemicals that require natural gas as an input: for this reason, the chemical sector has been harder hit by the cutting off of Russian pipeline gas than the rest of German industry, which itself has hardly dazzled since 2022. The German chemical giants have been forced to cut production, lay off personnel, and pause investments in Germany while announcing attention-grabbing new megaprojects in the United States and Asia — meanwhile representatives of the chemical industry association take to the airwaves to condemn the the AfD as a threat to a sector ostensibly reliant on migrant labour. East German Russophilia has many sources, not all of them rational, but Saxony-Anhalt’s acute structural dependence on Russian energy gives coherence to its inhabitants’ reluctance to participate in the great state project of rearmament for battle against Putin.
All this explains why conditions in Saxony-Anhalt are, even by the standards of a Germany in which everything seems to be falling apart, unusually favourable for an anti-establishment candidacy. Why has the AfD been able to monopolise this space? The reason is in large part the firewall, a device now so notorious abroad that it requires little explanation to a non-German readership, and which has furnished the party with an unassailable anti-establishment credibility. The firewall, reminiscent of the GDR’s popular front (which included such curiosities as an East German CDU), is particularly sour to the local palette. The coalition gymnastics performed by the other parties to enforce the firewall against an AfD that has achieved around ~30% at the last three eastern state elections, and which is well-established in local civil society, have discredited both the centre-right CDU, which has found itself reliant on the parliamentary support of the former GDR party of government to govern (as in Saxony and Thuringia, where it leads minority governments), but also the Left Party and an anti-war, moderately anti-migration splinter group, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). The AfD, which in the East can draw on the one hand from right-wing, anti-migration, and anti-communist voters alienated by the CDU and on the other from disaffected left-wing voters who abhor the political bubble’s hawkish foreign policy vis-a-vis Russia, admire the AfD’s Burnhamite language on economic policy (regional grievance akin to that of the north is widespread in East Germany), and aren’t exactly thrilled about migration themselves, thus emerges as the sole alternative for Germans minded to seek one.
The AfD is first and foremost an anti-immigration party, and their zeal has been an important factor in their rise. Saxony-Anhalt has experienced very little immigration relative to the rest of the country, with a foreign-born population of around 8% compared to a nationwide ~17% (residents with ‘migration background’, which includes the previous group as well as dual citizenship holders and the Germany-born children of migrants, account for 12% and 31% of the respective populations). The majority of these (~55%) are Europeans, with Ukrainians making up the largest group, followed by Syrians and Poles. Despite these modest figures, the Saxon-Anhaltese experience with migration has not been a happy one in recent years. As those who have spent time in Britain’s pokier seaside towns will be aware, a few bad apples are enough to spoil the bunch. And the apples have been very rotten indeed: Magdeburg, a pleasant town but one of the most boring places on earth, would have been thought an unlikely place for a terrorist attack. Perhaps that fact, or perhaps the circulation of some unusually graphic videos on social media in the immediate aftermath, was what gave the 2024 Christmas market car attack there a far greater resonance than similar attacks in larger cities. Saxony-Anhalt’s dearth of migrants has made organising against migration all the easier: a large migrant population creates a migration lobby; there are businesses that profit from their cheap and precarious labour, bureaucrats who handle their various interactions with the state, church employees and social workers who earn their daily bread from their maintenance, and of course many of the migrants themselves are, ten years after the Merkelwave, citizens with the right to vote. This petty gentry of concentrated benefits barely exists in Saxony-Anhalt, leaving the great godly voice of dispersed costs to have its say.
What kind of party is the AfD? After over a decade of its existence this is a question that could fill an entire library, but the simple answer is that the AfD is a generic right-wing protest party of the kind that emerged everywhere in Europe in the 2010s and 20s in response to certain policies pursued across the continent, mainly but not exclusively mass immigration, lockdowns, and an economic malaise which has many causes, but whose central and most politically salient driver is high energy prices caused by decoupling from traditional sources, in part through Net Zero-type legislation like the Energiewende and the European Green Deal, but partly (and more pertinently in Germany than elsewhere) through the loss of access to cheap Russian pipeline gas. A strange doxa in Britain holds that the AfD is a Neo-Nazi party— in fact, there exists none of the institutional continuity to older right-wing groups that other European populist parties can trace (even if they have programmatically moved on from them), and there is an internal ban in place on members of the Identitarians or the genuinely Neo-Nazi Heimat taking out a party membership. In its aims, its worldview, and its social base, the AfD is the German branch of the organic and (mostly) uncoordinated European social movement to which Reform also belongs.
Like Reform, the AfD unites a broad social coalition that cuts across traditional milieus. While report of a right-wing youth revolt is generally overplayed, it performs unusually well amongst young people for a party of the right (which is to say, going off data from the last federal election, in line with its average across all age groups), but its core age group is the prime working years. The party’s post-lockdown expansion has largely been driven by male voters (25% of whom voted AfD compared to 17% of women), although this gender gap did not exist in prior elections. The ‘left behind’ (workers and unemployed) disproportionately vote AfD, but their performance among small business owners is also respectable, and, as elsewhere in the West, one might speak of a productive coalition against the dependents of the state. The one discrepancy with Reform is its poor performance amongst the elderly, who disproportionately tend to consume traditional media, which is woker and more vehement in its attacks against the party than even those in Britain, where, in anecdotal experience, a higher diversity of opinion is expected and the public takes a more sceptical attitude.
Like Reform, the AfD’s goal is to solve specific problems rather than to provide a permanent representation to standing interests. The latter is an entirely legitimate goal for a political party, and the distinction is drawn here less to praise the AfD than to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. It is salient because the heterogeneity of social milieux that have converged upon the AfD contributes to a corresponding heterogeneity of worldviews, which precipitates in a lively internal debate over which particular problems the AfD should give more weight to. There persist substantive and uneasily resolved disputes over foreign policy orientation (primarily towards Russia), the optimal mechanisms of economic policy, and the ends and legitimate goals of migration control. The federal party supports ‘remigration’, though officially this is taken to mean that existing deportation orders will be more rigorously carried out. The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt takes a more robust line, pledging to use existing legal avenues to revoke citizenships and purge the state of ‘culturally alien’ elements. This is a familiar debate on the institutionalised European right, and here too the AfD is no exception to the norm.
German federalism has consequences for the AfD’s ideological profile that differentiate it from that of Reform, allowing more radical currents to have their day in the sun. Unlike the political parties in Britain, which are voluntary organisations mostly left to regulate their internal business, the parties in Germany are treated by law as public bodies ‘fulfilling a task made incumbent on them by the Basic Law’. The so-called Party Law (Parteiengesetz) dictates the parameters within which a party is to be organised; mandating a federal structure, internal democracy, and guaranteeing the party members certain rights vis-a-vis the party organs (disputes over the legality of a removal of party membership are a common back page item in German newspapers). Though the very detailed rules laid down in the Party Law are not so constricting as to wholly prevent the party’s central organs from regulating their internal business, it does afford the state-level organisations a certain autonomy from the centre and prevents the kind of top-down discipline that exists in Reform. Big, decisive, ‘Farage vs. Lowe’ style confrontations are thus rare; if a particular camp within the AfD cannot push through its agenda at national level, it has the option of retreating to a provincial base and biding its time for the mood to shift, as Björn Höcke for instance did in Thuringia. An unfortunate side effect here is to exacerbate regional differences and damper the AfD’s vote share in the West (where the party’s Russia-friendly stance and economic interventionism meets with incomprehension), though in practice this is not too different to the situation here, where, although Reform’s centralism means that it should be clear what its policy on any given issue, the message does not always cut through to the Great British Public so much as do the vibes.
The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is unusually conservative by the party’s standards. The culture war is hardly front and centre for the federal AfD, which is after all captained by a lesbian with a Sri Lankan wife, and whose approach follows the familiar, post-lockdown pattern of daring sallies against Wokeness, bread-and-butter proposals like abolishing the license fee, and a general feeling that the country should be ‘normal’ again. That culture and identity should play such a strong role in the election campaign in Saxony-Anhalt is partly a quirk of German federalism, under which education and cultural policy are the most important briefs allotted to the states, but it has just as much to do with the importance that the state party’s leadership attaches to these topics. Though fronted by the charismatic yet vapid Ulrich Siegmund, a local businessman with an extraordinarily large TikTok following, the party’s intellectual mastermind and de facto leader is Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, once a promising young arabist at the University of Bayreuth who has sat for the AfD in the state parliament since 2016, and was among the first to recognise that this party of disgruntled economics professors had a future beyond the lecture hall.
Tillschneider, well-versed in the thought of the nouvelle droite, is no shadowy operator who keeps his cards close to his chest, but has played a public-facing role in the campaign and placed his own hobby horses at its centre. Tillschneider’s hand can be seen in promises in the party’s manifesto to reform the building code to prioritise traditional architecture; in the promise of a patriotic curriculum emphasising the sunnier parts of German history (‘Bismarck’); in plans to (in a shot across the bow against the West German boomers) promote the study of the Russian language; and in the detailed prescriptions for Tilllschneider’s old stomping grounds at the state’s faculties of Middle Eastern Studies. Somewhat worryingly, the manifesto opens with an Orbán-style pro-natal policy, although unlike in Hungary, where the policy mostly relied on tax credits, the manifesto suggests this will be conducted through fiscal transfers. This is ‘metapolitics’ conducted with 20th century methods, and whether it works in an age where a greasy-haired backwater businessman can simply bypass established mechanisms of cultural transmission and TikTok his way into the statehouse is anyone’s guess.
What else is on a future AfD government’s agenda? On migration policy, the options are limited: the federal states do not have control over who enters and exits their borders, and so much of the chapter on migration consists of declarations of things the AfD would propose or support in the Bundesrat (the upper parliamentary chamber made up of state representatives), where they would be only one small delegation among many and none of the others would vote for their proposals. There are promises to ramp up deportations, compel refugees to perform labour service, and instruct local authorities to use the discretion the law affords them in evaluating residence claims and citizenship applications to reject as many as they reasonably can. Since said applications are handled by the states themselves (and usually delegated to municipal or regional authorities, although the AfD plans to create a central state office for handling them uniformly), there is quite a bit an AfD government can do here, including the retroactive revocation of citizenship in cases where it can be proven that this was obtained fraudulently (since naturalisation involves demonstrating ‘a commitment to the free and democratic fundamental order’, in practice this may be a matter of digging up a few old social media comments).
The AfD will have to be careful, because the Federal Authority for the Protection of the Constitution, an internal intelligence agency equivalent to MI5, will be watching over their shoulder, and will use any zealotry as an excuse to press for a ban of the party wholesale. German federalism affords it the tools to fight back: the police, the public prosecution, and a State Office for the Protection of the Constitution are all in the state government’s hands. The first two are entirely under local control (to the point that the European Court of Justice has rejected the validity of European arrest warrants issued by German prosecutors on grounds of their lack of independence from the executive); the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution’s relationship to the equivalent local authority on the other hand is regulated by a federal law that can be altered by a majority in the Bundestag. This law empowers the federal authority to compel the state body to perform certain tasks on its behalf, although it of course cannot compel it to carry them out competently. Internal resistance to an AfD government within these organisations will leave the Messrs. Siegmund and Tillschneider in a bind: while bureaucratic disobedience and sabotage can paralyse a government, any attempt to use the legal mechanisms available to the government to impose order in their own house will be noted down and interpreted as Machtergreifung by a hostile intelligence community, judiciary, and media when the time comes to litigate a ban on the party before the Constitutional Court — an idea that has become increasingly popular amongst Germany’s political class, with a recent op-ed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by the defence minister Boris Pistorius — the country’s most popular politician — and the Baden-Württemberg premier Cem Özdemir calling to shut down the party’s eastern state organisations.
Germany’s political establishment will do everything within its legal remit to prevent the AfD forming a government in Saxony-Anhalt, or at least it will try to give the impression of doing so. Quietly, I think they would like to see it happen. An AfD government in the state would have responsibility with very little power: it cannot remedy the state’s economic woes, which are structural rather than driven by the incumbent state government’s policy, and though its remigration incantations might be able to ward off new immigrants from the state, it will be unable to displace the existing population. Its patriotic curriculum will do little to instil a nationalist consciousness in the youth, while leftists outside of the state will furnish it as proof that the AfD intends to ‘falsify history’, and its policy of committing teachers to ‘political neutrality’ will allow the establishment to take the potent rhetorical weapon of ‘free speech’ out of the AfD’s hands.
The Saxony-Anhalt AfD’s declared intention to be a model for a federal AfD government will be taken seriously; every newspaper in the country will be laser-focused on the new government’s growing pains, and its culturally conservative orientation and eastern peculiarities will be interpreted as the national party’s ‘secret’ program, alienating it from a West German public which, after all, is content to have a lesbian with Sri Lankan girlfriend running the shop. This is not to say the German public is Woke; it is, by European standards, a relatively conservative society that reliably returns a centre-right majority and will weep few tears for a reversal of Merkel’s cultural revolution, but if it can be tricked into believing that the AfD has launched ‘an American-style culture war’ without delivering any of the demographic or economic benefits that even the best state government is in no position to deliver, it will sour on the AfD nationwide. The establishment’s more foresighted strategists will happily throw Saxony-Anhalt under the rails in order to stop the AfD train reaching Berlin.
How likely is the AfD to form government in Saxony-Anhalt? In Germany the polls are a reliable indicator of where the die roughly fall, and they have had party polling at just over 40% for around a year now. Whether this will suffice for a majority depends on who clears the 5% hurdle — the CDU and the Left are comfortably in the door, and at the time of writing, both the Greens and the SPD will narrowly make it, while the BSW won’t. Tactical voting could play a role, although these numbers will encourage complacency, so the final tally is anyone’s guess. In the event that the AfD falls short of a majority, a contentious coalition negotiation between this unwieldy mob of parties could lead to a few defections that nudge it over the line. While the potential for an arrangement with the Left to instantly split the CDU, as some commentators seem to think it will, is overplayed (the Christian Democrats already govern at the post-communists’ pleasure in Saxony and Thuringia, and Berlin’s unique mechanisms of socialisation facilitate a similar comity at the federal level), the parliamentary arithmetic could mean that very few floor crossings are needed (perhaps honeyed by the promise of a cabinet post), and this is more plausible than the entire party falling apart. Even if the party itself survives a CDU/Left pact, it will gut the CDU vote in the east — it is, after all, not the CDU’s voters, but its apparatchiks who fondle each other in Berlin’s fetish bars.
As cathartic as an AfD win would be, then, perhaps there is more to be gained at a national level from yet another frustration by an establishment whose increasingly poorly justified attempts to hold the levers of power just beyond the grasp of the popular revolt have done little but reveal the truth of its message — that in Germany, one is faced with a single choice: the status quo, or its alternative.
This article was written by Franz Pokorny, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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Insightful and interesting, thank you.
If they win victory do they know how to use one Hannibal?