GoKawiilAlternative for Germany (AfD) may not have won the supermajority it sought in the Saxony-Anhalt state election on Sunday, but the far-right party did take another giant step toward power in a country whose postwar democracy was designed to prevent the return of right-wing extremism. The AfD’s win, which co-leader Alice Weidel described as “historic,” also showed that in Germany, as elsewhere in Europe, the center is not holding as firmly as it once did.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the AfD’s victory has shaken his conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) “to its very foundations” and would have “consequences” reaching well beyond the region.
“It is an election result we cannot simply move past as if nothing happened,” he said Monday. “It is the most severe election defeat the CDU has suffered in years, indeed in decades.”
Alice Weidel, co-leader of the Alternative for Germany party, arrives for a press conference in Berlin on Monday, September 7. Ebrahim Noroozi/AP
On Sunday, the CDU didn’t just lose support to the AfD at the margins, but more than half its 2021 vote outright, with the AfD more than doubling its own share in the former East German state to 44% in a single electoral cycle.
The AfD was already the largest opposition party in the federal parliament in Berlin, making the “eastern exception” argument — that this is a regional, post-Communist phenomenon — harder to sustain. The CDU’s rhetoric on migration has shifted further right as the AFD’s popularity has grown. And with each win at state level, the “Brandmauer,” or “firewall against the far-right,” that prevents ultra-nationalist parties like AfD from joining ruling coalitions is being tested a little more by parliamentary arithmetic as much as by principle. The question now is: How much longer can a democratic argument be made to justify the firewall?
A similar question is also facing Europe as a whole. In Brussels, the so-called “cordon sanitaire,” the European Union’s own version of the far-right firewall, is also under pressure from mathematics.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz holds a news conference in response to the Saxony-Anhalt state election in Berlin, September 7, 2026. Florian Gaertner/dpa/picture-alliance/AP
Three hard-right groups hold 196 seats combined in the European Parliament, representing parties from more than a dozen member states. Together, they represent the Parliament’s second-largest force by seat count, even though the three rarely vote as a bloc. And while they remain walled off from the EU’s top jobs, they are already reshaping the organization’s debates on migration, aid to Ukraine and the “Green Deal” aimed at reaching climate neutrality.
At national level, too, far-right parties now lead coalitions in Italy and the Czech Republic and serve as junior governing partners in Finland, Croatia, Slovakia and Sweden. And where the far right doesn’t hold power, it is still setting the terms of the debate: The Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) topped Austria’s national vote in 2024, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) remains one of the largest blocs in the Dutch parliament despite the collapse of its coalition last year, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has been France’s most consistently popular party for years. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has spent four years proving a party with post-fascist roots can govern from the center-right without spooking financial markets.
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