The AfD Wins Saxony-Anhalt But Falls Three Seats Short
Defending Democracy Against The Majority Was Always Going To End Here
Ten years of moral quarantine produced a party at 43.8 per cent, a Left below its 2021 result, and a governing coalition with nothing to offer a state it spent a generation running down.
The result that ought to be read first is the Christian Democrats': halved, out of office, and taking the FDP out of the Landtag with them. junge Welt filed it under the only headline that fits — Merz sank the Union in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD's 43.8 per cent is the consequence. Treating the consequence as the event is how ten years of this politics have been organised, and it is why the people organising it are now in opposition to a party they cannot beat.
Thomas Zimmermann's verdict in Jacobin is the sentence the week should be remembered by: "Die Demokratie kann man nicht gegen überwältigende Mehrheiten und mobilisierte Nichtwähler verteidigen, sondern nur mit ihnen." Democracy cannot be defended against overwhelming majorities and mobilised non-voters, only with them. The AfD has no majority; neither does the camp assembled against it; between them sits the BSW, whose lead candidate has already said "Wir werden uns an einer Brandmauer-Koalition nicht beteiligen."
A cordon that leaves the party it excludes at 43.8 per cent has not failed at the last moment. It has been failing the whole time.
The Left's own result is the part its press is not entitled to skip. Eight to nine per cent, worse than 2021, possibly behind both the SPD and the Greens, after polling clearly third — and this in the year its crisis was supposed to be over. A party that spends a campaign explaining which conservative it might be prepared to install as minister-president has told its voters, accurately, that it is a fixture of the arrangement rather than an alternative to it. The AfD gained 157,000 former non-voters. Those people were available to somebody else first.
None of which makes the winners harmless, and the local record is not abstract. In May the state criminal police set up a task force against far-right youth groups targeting queer, migrant and left-wing people. The week before the vote a youth club in Gardelegen burned. A teacher in Stendal was formally reprimanded after being reported for speaking against the AfD in school. A voter told Die Zeit only that she had voted "demokratisch", and would not say more. That is what a changed climate looks like from underneath, and no amount of firewall rhetoric in Berlin has done anything about it.
The result that ought to be read first is the Christian Democrats': halved, out of office, and taking the FDP out of the Landtag with them at around two and a half per cent. junge Welt filed it under the only headline that fits — Merz sank the Union in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD's 43.8 per cent is the consequence, and treating the consequence as the event is how ten years of this politics have been organised. It is also why the people organising it now find themselves in opposition to a party they have no way of beating.
Thomas Zimmermann's verdict in Jacobin is the sentence the week should be remembered by: "Die Demokratie kann man nicht gegen überwältigende Mehrheiten und mobilisierte Nichtwähler verteidigen, sondern nur mit ihnen." Democracy cannot be defended against overwhelming majorities and mobilised non-voters, only with them. The arithmetic makes the point without any help. The AfD has no majority. The camp assembled against it has no majority either. Between them sits the BSW, whose lead candidate has already said "Wir werden uns an einer Brandmauer-Koalition nicht beteiligen" — we will not take part in a firewall coalition.
A cordon that leaves the party it excludes at 43.8 per cent has not failed at the last moment. It has been failing the whole time.
The Left's own result is the part its press is not entitled to skip. Eight to nine per cent, worse than 2021, possibly behind both the SPD and the Greens, after polling clearly third — and this in the year its crisis was supposed to have been overcome. A party that spends a campaign explaining which conservative it might be prepared to install as minister-president has told its voters, accurately, that it is a fixture of the arrangement rather than an alternative to it. Meanwhile the AfD gained an estimated 157,000 former non-voters and 83,000 former CDU voters. The first of those numbers is the indictment: those people were not the AfD's to begin with, and they were available to somebody else first.
The objection is obvious and deserves an answer rather than a sneer: if the firewall goes, an openly far-right party sits in a state government, and the people who pay for that are not the columnists. True. But the choice being offered is not between the cordon and nothing. It is between a cordon that has visibly stopped working and a politics that competes for the same voters on the ground they actually live on — wages that trail the west, a chemical industry squeezed by energy costs, clinics and rail lines closed, and a decade in which every federal government treated the east as a problem of attitude. The AfD did not create those conditions. It moved into them, and it did so unopposed.
None of which makes the winners harmless, and the local record is not abstract. In May the state criminal police set up a task force against far-right youth groups targeting queer, migrant and left-wing people, whose meeting places have become targets. The week before the vote a youth club in Gardelegen burned out. A teacher in Stendal was formally reprimanded after being reported for speaking against the AfD at school. A voter told Die Zeit only that she had voted "demokratisch", and would not say more, for fear of consequences. That is what a changed climate looks like from underneath, and no quantity of firewall rhetoric in Berlin has done anything about it.
The last piece is who claimed the result and how fast. Elon Musk wrote "Gut gemacht!" under Alice Weidel's post; Ulrich Siegmund replied within the hour that if his party took responsibility he would warmly welcome "eine starke und konstruktive Zusammenarbeit", and pitched Germany to him as a place worth investing in again. Matteo Salvini congratulated "meine Freundin Alice Weidel"; Herbert Kickl called the result "gelebte Demokratie" and the elites' firewall torn down. A state of two million people, hollowed out over thirty years, has just been made an exhibit in somebody else's argument. That is not a reason to defend the arrangement that produced it. It is a reason to notice how little the arrangement was ever protecting.
