Option 4: Deploy the nuclear option
The most powerful constitutional instrument would be Bundeszwang, or federal coercion. Under Article 37 of Germany’s Basic Law, the federal government, with the consent of the Bundesrat — the chamber representing the states — may take “necessary measures” to compel a state to fulfill its legal obligations. In plain English: Berlin could force a state government to obey federal law.
The provision has never been used. In the reporting for this story, no one interviewed brought it up on their own — perhaps out of conviction, perhaps out of fear that merely mentioning it would play into the AfD’s hands before the elections.
Within AfD’s right-wing intellectual circles, federal coercion has long been treated as a realistic scenario. In 2025, publisher Götz Kubitschek, whose estate lies in Saxony-Anhalt and who the New York Times once labeled “the prophet of Germany’s new right,” told POLITICO this is what he would expect to see happen.
A potential trigger can only be guessed at. If, for example, an AfD government in Saxony-Anhalt failed to provide for even the most basic needs of asylum seekers, the federal government could intervene with binding orders to restore those services, eventually through a federal commissioner with the authority to issue instructions to the state and all its authorities.
Would all this work?
Whatever Germany’s political establishment does to contain the country’s first AfD government, this fall or later, the risks are obvious. Measures meant to defend liberal democracy could also feed the AfD’s central grievance and that of many of its voters: that the establishment refuses to accept the party even when it wins.
Public opinion on this is more divided than it once was. A representative poll from July found that only 42 percent of Germans still considered it right for the Social Democrats and the CDU to refuse cooperation with the AfD; another survey showed that support for the exclusion strategy had fallen to 46 percent, down from 54 percent in early 2025.
