Far-right win in Germany puts Europe’s biggest economy under pressure

A landslide electoral victory for the far-right in the small but significant state of Saxony-Anhalt over the weekend is sending shockwaves through Europe and piling pressure on Germany’s federal government.

Alternative for Germany (AfD) secured the highest share of the vote at 43.8%, well above the 17.2% of the incumbent Christian Democratic Union Party (CDU), which also leads the country’s national coalition under Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Initial results show the AfD securing 39 of 83 parliamentary seats, leaving it three seats short of an outright majority and uncertain over its ability to form a new state government.

A so-called “firewall” sees other parties in Germany agree not to cooperate with far-right in a way that would give it political power. However, AfD candidate Ulrich Siegmund said Monday that the party would hold discussions with “individual parliamentary groups or individual MPs” to see if they would support it in governing, according to Reuters.

The “extraordinary” result may be the “most consequential German state-election result of the postwar era,” Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at consultancy Eurasia Group, said Monday.

While the AfD has been growing in popularity for years, particularly in eastern Germany, the result raises the prospect of the hard right taking power in a German state for the first time since the Nazi era.

At state level, the party has pledged stringently anti-refugee and anti-migrant policies, including accelerating deportations and separating the children of refugees into different classrooms, while encouraging SMEs to use AI rather than migrant workers and financially incentivizing families to have more children.

Voters “seeking a genuinely radical break” voted AfD while liberal and left-wing voters swung to the Greens and Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), squeezing the CDU from both sides, Rahman said in a note. If it continues, that trend could see upcoming elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin turn “a regional earthquake into a rolling national crisis,” he added.

The result also deals a hammer blow to the federal government of Merz, who polling suggests is deeply unpopular.

Questions over the future of German industry, innovation and welfare were dominant…