Germany's poorest state just voted furthest right, that is not a coincidence

On 6 September, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 43.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, more than doubling its 2021 result and recording the strongest performance by a far-right party in any German state election since 1945.

The Christian Democrats, who have led the state government for most of the period since reunification, collapsed to 17.2 per cent. The Social Democrats took 9.3 per cent, the Greens 8.9, the Left 8.6, and the new left-nationalist BSW scraped past the threshold with 5.3, according to NPR. Turnout climbed to 77.8 per cent, nearly eighteen points above the last election, so this was not a protest by abstention but a verdict delivered in unusual numbers.

The AfD holds 39 of the 83 seats in the Magdeburg assembly, three short of a majority, and fell just short of the votes it needed to govern alone. Co-chair Tino Chrupalla went further and declared that the Brandmauer, the political firewall the mainstream parties built to keep the AfD out of office, had been rejected by the electorate. Chancellor Friedrich Merz called it the most serious defeat his party has suffered in decades.

Abroad, the reaction followed a familiar script. Poland's prime minister Donald Tusk said only idiots or traitors could celebrate the result, while Elon Musk posted "Gut gemacht!" and Richard Grenell, the former American ambassador in Berlin, called it a new day for Germany, as Al Jazeera reported. What both camps were reacting to is that a party whose Saxony-Anhalt branch is classified by the state's own intelligence service as a right-wing extremist organisation is now the largest force in the chamber.

Start with the party itself. The federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution designated the AfD a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation in May 2025 after a three-year investigation. The party sued, and a Cologne administrative court this year barred the agency from publicly using that label while proceedings continue, returning the AfD to the weaker status of a suspected case at federal level, though several eastern branches remain classified as extremist and under surveillance.

A movement that litigates its way through the administrative courts and wins procedural relief is operating inside the constitutional order rather than against it from the streets, and that is what makes it hard to handle.

Then there is the party's public face. Alice Weidel, its co-leader, was raised in North Rhine-Westphalia in the west, worked at Goldman Sachs, lives in a Swiss village and has two sons with her partner of two decades, a woman born in Sri Lanka, as NBC News has documented. She leads a party that campaigns for the traditional family and against immigration. The contradiction is not hypocrisy alone; it is strategy. It allows the AfD to present ethno-nationalism in a register that a 2026 electorate will accept, and every time an opponent reaches for the Hitler comparison, Weidel''s biography does the rebuttal for her.

None of which makes the party harmless. Björn Höcke, who leads its Thuringia branch, was convicted in 2024 for using a banned Nazi-era slogan and fined again for the same offence weeks later, and the völkisch tradition he speaks for is genuine. But that tradition has been available in Germany continuously since 1945 and it won almost nothing at the ballot box for six decades. What changed in Saxony-Anhalt is not the supply of the ideology. It is the demand for it.

So the question worth asking is not whether the AfD resembles the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). It is why 43.8 per cent of voters in one federal state were willing to hand it power, when the party polls around 30 per cent nationally and far less in Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg. The answer lies in a division that reunification declared closed in 1990 and never actually closed.

Saxony-Anhalt is one of the poorest states in the federation. Its economic output per head is roughly three quarters of the national average, unemployment runs above the national rate and median earnings for full-time workers sit below it, according to Deutsche Welle's survey of the state's economy.

There is chemical work around Leuna and Bitterfeld, and machinery and automotive supply, but nothing on the scale of Wolfsburg or Stuttgart. Where the great German industrial names do operate in the east, they operate plants. The headquarters, the research divisions and the boards remain in the west. When Intel abandoned the semiconductor complex it had promised to build in Magdeburg, the state lost the story it had been telling itself about its future.

Money was not the problem. Roughly two trillion euros in transfers moved east after 1990. What the transfers could not buy was ownership. The Treuhand agency privatised or liquidated most of the East German industrial base within four years, largely into western hands, and the professional class that ran eastern institutions before 1990 was replaced wholesale.

Thirty-six years later, a University of Leipzig study published in August found that east Germans remain sharply under-represented in senior positions in business, the judiciary, the universities and the federal civil service. Around a fifth of the population supplies a far smaller share of the people who decide anything.

The demographic consequence compounds the economic one. Between 1990 and the mid-2000s the east lost a very large share of its young people to western cities, and it lost young women faster than young men, which left whole districts of rural Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg older, emptier and more male than anywhere else in the country.

Those who stayed watched schools, clinics, rail branch lines and bank branches close in sequence. Eastern schools still test respectably, so the deficit is not one of ability; the graduates simply leave. A region that exports its qualified young people ends up with a workforce concentrated in lower-paid service and supply work, which is exactly the profile the wage statistics show. The material experience of the past three decades in these districts has been subtraction.

This is the ground the AfD works. Its achievement has been to convert a grievance about class, ownership and regional neglect into a grievance about foreigners. Saxony-Anhalt is not a state under demographic pressure from migration. Foreign nationals make up around 9 per cent of its population, well below the national figure, and net migration into the state has been positive since 2016 for German citizens as well as for foreigners, which in a shrinking region is an economic necessity rather than an emergency. The AfD nonetheless fought the campaign on deportations, on Islam and on the cost of asylum, and won 43.8 per cent doing it.

The mechanism is old and reliable. Take a real injury with a complicated structural cause, offer a visible and defenceless culprit, and promise that removing the culprit will restore what was lost. Pensions are thin and clinics are closing because money is going to asylum seekers. Wages are low because immigrants undercut them. Berlin ignores you because Berlin cares more about Kabul than about Halle. None of this survives contact with the budget figures. All of it survives contact with a voter who has watched his town hollow out for thirty years and has never once been asked what he thought about it.

Russia belongs in the same account. The AfD opposes military aid to Ukraine and campaigns for cheap Russian gas, which sells in the east for reasons that have little to do with sympathy for the Kremlin. The chemical plants of the Leuna and Bitterfeld belt are energy-intensive and sanctions raised their input costs. At the level of the household budget, a vote to abandon Kyiv is another vote about prices.

Two caveats. The Left party still took 8.6 per cent in Saxony-Anhalt and the BSW entered the assembly, so the eastern protest vote is not uniformly right-wing. It is anti-establishment, and it has moved between left and right populist vehicles for a decade. The firewall also has an arithmetic problem.

Excluding the AfD in a chamber where it holds 39 of 83 seats requires the Christian Democrats to govern alongside parties they have spent years defining themselves against, a coalition of the outvoted that the AfD will spend the next five years describing as proof that elections in Germany do not count. American vice-president JD Vance has already told a Munich audience that there is no room for firewalls.

Germany's institutions are still working. Its courts are constraining its own intelligence service, and its far-right party is bound by coalition arithmetic it cannot yet break. What happened in Saxony-Anhalt is that a region kept economically and politically subordinate for a generation found the one party willing to tell it that its humiliation was real, and that party attached the humiliation to the wrong cause.

Redirecting justified anger onto an invented enemy is the oldest move in politics, and it is the part of the 1930s worth worrying about. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin vote on 20 September. The lesson travels well beyond Germany: a state that treats a poor region as a permanent transfer recipient rather than as a political equal should not be surprised by what that region eventually votes for.

* Arman Ahmed is Founder & President, DhakaThinks, Research Analyst, Nicholas Spykman International Center and Research Fellow, ICHRPP

* The views expressed here are the author's own