Writing in 2005 on the riots that swept France’s cities that autumn, Jean Baudrillard remarked that ‘all the excluded, the disaffiliated, whether from the banlieues, immigrants or “native-born”, at one point or another turn their disaffiliation into defiance and go onto the offensive’. Months earlier, in a fragment on the French ‘Non’ to a proposed European Constitution, which he characterized as a ‘refusal of this “there-is-no-alternative” Europe’, Baudrillard had warned of the breakdown of democracy, ‘inasmuch as the representative institutions no longer function in the “democratic” direction – from the people and the citizens towards the authorities – but in reverse: from the authorities down’. The ‘No’ vote was, in this reading, the refusal of a political order that leaves the public with the sole option of endorsing ready-made agreements.

The rightist Alternative für Deutschland’s victory in the Saxony-Anhalt Landtag election on 6 September gives political refusal a new form in the Federal Republic. Excluded by a cartel of the extreme centre since its founding in 2013, it achieved, amid record turnout of close to 78 per cent, a plurality of nearly 44 per cent – the largest share taken by any party in a German Land election in over eleven years. It came out on top in every one of Saxony-Anhalt’s 218 municipalities, including Halle and Magdeburg, the Land’s largest cities. Five years ago, the CDU had won 37.1 per cent against the AfD’s 20.8; this time their positions were reversed, and the AfD led by an even wider margin, with the CDU reduced to 17.2 per cent. The CDU, SPD and Greens together took only 35.4 per cent, nearly eight-and-a-half points below the AfD alone, which on 28 per cent nationally is now Germany’s most popular party. Among Saxony-Anhalt’s manual workers (Arbeiter) – roughly a tenth of the electorate – around 60 per cent voted for the AfD; the party drew in a net 170,000 of 2021’s non-voters, well ahead of the nearest competitor, the CDU, which attracted 30,000 of them. Majorities of those with low or intermediate levels of formal education also backed it, as did 65 per cent of those describing their financial situation as distressed.

Situated in the western part of the former GDR, Saxony-Anhalt comprises extensive rural areas and the industrial centres of Leuna and Bitterfeld in the ‘central German chemical triangle’ or Chemiedreieck. With around 2.1 million inhabitants, it is one of Germany’s poorest Länder and, demographically, its oldest. Wages are among the lowest in the country. In no other German Land are there more people of retirement age relative to the working-age population. It has suffered from the demographic collapse characteristic of many of the new Länder of the former GDR: its population has fallen by 26 per cent since unification, the steepest decline anywhere in Germany. Here, dissatisfaction with the incumbent government and its CDU minister-president Sven Schulze is what underpins the AfD’s landslide.

Despite its convincing win, the AfD is three seats short of a parliamentary majority, and the other parties may yet find a way to keep it out of government. The high hurdle of five per cent normally required for entry into the Landtag means that the distribution of seats, and therefore the prospects of a majority, can depend on the performance of smaller parties. In this election, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW)’s 5.3 per cent result will give it five seats; its leadership has ruled out both joining any coalition government and participating in the Brandmauer (firewall) against the AfD. Those parties committed to the Brandmauer – CDU (17.2 per cent), SPD (9.3 per cent), Greens (8.9 per cent), Die Linke (8.6 per cent) – have, combined, taken 39 seats, identical to the AfD’s total. How this arithmetic affects the composition of the next government depends in turn on the procedures for electing the minister-president.

The Saxony-Anhalt constitution requires an absolute majority of Landtag members to elect a minister-president by secret ballot in the first two rounds of voting. If no such majority can be reached, the newly formed Landtag then votes on whether to dissolve itself and trigger new elections; if it does not do so, a third vote on the minister-president is held, with a lower threshold requiring only a majority of votes cast. Abstentions in the third round therefore reduce the denominator and can make a majority easier to achieve. This leaves the BSW in an unusually consequential position. The party has said it will vote for neither Schulze nor the AfD’s Ulrich Siegmund and plans to abstain in the third round. Assuming the two opposing blocs remain united, neither would reach the required 42 votes in the first two rounds, and the third would produce a 39–39 deadlock. In these circumstances, BSW’s call for a ‘non-partisan’ minister-president, surrounded by a cabinet of ‘experts’, may not be as far-fetched as it once appeared. Such a solution could see a compromise cabinet effectively operate as a minority government, seeking majorities in the Landtag for its legislation and budget on a case-by-case basis.

The parliamentary jostling, the electioneering that preceded Sunday’s vote, the spectacular backfiring of the Brandmauer and the role of the small parties have revealed a political climate characterized by ricochets and unintended consequences. Journalists and federal party leaders have attempted willy-nilly to respond to these dynamics. While the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung registered the event plainly as ‘AfD triumphs – CDU collapses’, Merz himself said he was ‘deeply shocked’ by the CDU’s defeat. In the Bundestag, however, he stressed that a majority of 56 per cent still had not voted for the AfD. Essays in Die Zeit and the left-liberal t.a.z. sounded the alarm, declaring an ‘emergency’; the latter ran a commentary renewing the call to ban the AfD on the grounds that the ‘enemies of democracy cannot be defeated through debate’, a position backed by the SPD, Greens and Die Linke.

Yet the AfD has benefited precisely from its exclusion. Due to the taboo against it, it has been able to channel much of the polity’s indignation about a steadily diminished standard of living without being tarnished by the record of any government. It has become the principal opposition to a despised regime. Only 13 per cent are satisfied with the chancellor’s performance, the lowest figure recorded for an incumbent in the ARD-DeutschlandTrend; he also ranks last among the six European leaders in a July survey.

The sources of this disaffection lie in the political decisions and economic difficulties of the last decades. Although Germany was until recently hailed as a great success story due to its relatively good economic performance during the Eurocrisis years – coinciding with Angela Merkel’s chancellorship – it remained vulnerable to longer-term pressures on its key industries, which enjoyed only temporary advantages produced by a weakened euro, wage repression and high rates of growth in its export markets, especially China. The period’s apparent successes masked persistent weaknesses in domestic investment. By 2025, the trade balance in capital goods with China had turned negative, one manifestation of what has been called the ‘China shock’. Politically, the Agenda 2010 programme of austerity, imposed by Gerhard Schröder’s SPD-Green government between 2003 and 2005, tightened unemployment support and increased pressure on claimants, disproportionately in eastern Länder like Saxony-Anhalt. More recently, rising energy costs due to the war in Ukraine and the sabotage of Germany’s energy infrastructure, as well as the announcement of a military build-up known as the Zeitenwende, have put further pressure on much of the population as Germany suffers from prolonged economic stagnation.

What politics does the AfD offer the voters it has mobilised? Reflecting the party’s origins in a liberal opposition to the Eurozone bailouts of the last decade and its increasingly chauvinist politics since then, the answer is mixed. Its Saxony-Anhalt programme speaks directly to certain material grievances: cheaper energy and fuel, lower taxes, the revival of declining rural areas that have lost ground to urban centres and renewed investment in hospitals, alongside free childcare and school meals. Yet these promises sit beside a strict commitment to the debt brake and a proposed cut of at least ten per cent in spending across the ministries. The contradiction between its calls for expanded public provision and pledge of fiscal austerity is stark.

Civil-libertarian and antiwar notes in the AfD programme and rhetoric – an accounting of the contradictions of the Covid period, opposition to Germany’s funding and arms deliveries for a spiralling war in Ukraine, criticism of the publicly funded educational and media apparatuses conflating dissent with pro-Moscow treason – coexist with openly racist reaction and philistinism. The Saxony-Anhalt programme proposes heartless deportation measures, school segregation for refugee pupils and the formation of a voluntary ‘Citizens Watch’ (Bürgerwacht) as part of its internal security platform. It also calls for ‘patriotic’ changes in education and cultural funding, countering the Land’s Bauhaus-derived moderndenken publicity campaign with its own stylised deutschdenken and an emphasis on ‘national rootedness’. Its hostility to the Bauhaus has raised the prospect that it would cut the Land’s funding of the Dessau foundation.

At the federal level, contradictions are particularly evident in foreign policy. The AfD has, for instance, argued for a diplomatic resolution to the war in Ukraine, based on a realist assessment of what is in Germany’s national interest concerning energy policy and the fate of its industrial competitiveness. But the AfD is far from a party of peace. On-message with the establishment consensus, it backs rearmament and the strengthening of the Bundeswehr, though it differs on how to fund this. Its foreign policy spokesman Markus Frohnmaier approved of Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of Maduro, and later praised the joint US-Israeli strike on Iran (‘the central destabilising factor in the region’) for its ‘surgical precision’, referring to the Americans as ‘our most important partner’, though Weidel and her co-chair Tino Chrupalla warned of the dangers set in motion by the attack. In 2023, the AfD parliamentary group called for Palantir’s surveillance software to be made available immediately to Germany’s federal and criminal police as well as customs authorities.

Much of the reactionary character of the AfD is, however, already shared by Germany’s establishment. While Saxony-Anhalt’s Verfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution) has classified the Land’s AfD as ‘confirmed right-wing extremist’, the federal-level Verfassungsschutz – led from 1955-72 by Hubert Schrübbers, a former SA member and Nazi prosecutor – has treated Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions as a suspected extremist case. The Grand Coalition in Berlin, meanwhile, approved nearly €736 million in arms exports to Tel Aviv in the second quarter of 2026 alone, and remains a steadfast backer of its war of annihilation in Gaza; in early September it delivered to the IDF Navy a sixth Dolphin-class submarine, part of a fleet presumed to comprise Tel Aviv’s second-strike nuclear capability. Merz, Klingbeil, Pistorius and their associates continue to spend billions backing a campaign of nuclear brinkmanship with Moscow. Far-right elements in Kiev’s armed forces and Ukraine’s official reburial with state honours of Nazi collaborator Andriy Melnyk remain unaffected by any firewall against the extreme right. At home, German enforcement of EU sanctions has de-banked journalist Hüseyin Doğru and his family over allegations of having spread ‘disinformation’ concerning Palestine and other matters on behalf of Russia. The domestic intelligence services also now monitor individuals and groups under the heading of ‘constitutionally relevant delegitimisation of the state’. On migration and asylum, the governing centre pushes for ‘more limitation, more rejections, more control, more deportations’, as Merz put it in his first policy statement to the Bundestag.

Political reaction – militarisation and repression above all – appears across nearly all the parties. Few political currents today challenge rearmament as a matter of principle. A combination of taboo and repression has allowed an unpopular holy alliance spanning two successive governments to drive politics, while a largely disaffiliated electorate looks on. In the process, the liberal centre has essentially forfeited the ideological repertoire that once legitimated it; the AfD’s opportunistic appropriation of it indicates the scale of this abdication. The consequence is a strange inversion: the right has taken up, publicly at least, the language of discussion and openness that Carl Schmitt identified a century ago as the essential principles of parliamentarism, while the establishment’s self-proclaimed guardians of democracy speak in far more Schmittian terms about the political interests and antagonisms lying beneath formally parliamentary procedures. Schmitt’s diagnosis went further: genuine public argument was giving way to propaganda, suggestion and what, following Walter Lippmann, he called the ‘symbol’, leaving parliamentary forms as ‘superfluous decoration’.

There are other ideas in Dessau, distinct from ‘firewalls’ and Heimat symbolism. Paul Klee’s notebooks, drawn from his Bauhaus lectures of the 1920s and later collected in English as The Thinking Eye, deal with motion and transformation, the relations among elementary forms and colours: point, line, plane; orange to blue. In the Bauhaus Museum, a 1929 issue of the school’s quarterly, bauhaus, presents Henrik Neugeboren’s proposal for a Bach monument: a fugue transposed into three-dimensional structure. On the Friday afternoon before the election, east of the Hauptbahnhof, few were out on the side-streets between the museum, which opened in the city centre in 2019, and a pedestrian boulevard around the Rathaus. A worn plaque dedicated to Kurt Weill, native to the city, read: ‘Music must reflect the spirit of the times – uncomfortable, direct and honest.’ Later, in Siedlung, west of the tracks near the Bauhaus campus, students were readying an exhibition. A line formed outside the Gropius-designed headquarters. Flags advertising the centenary were visible through the windows. By Sunday evening, the scale of the electoral transformation in Saxony-Anhalt was evident. What its longer-term significance will be, and what real alternatives may emerge, remain undetermined.

Read on: Sahra Wagenknecht, ‘Condition of Germany’, NLR 146.