What links the thuggish masked agitation in southern England this weekend and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) best-ever result in a German state – where it more than doubled the 21% vote it received five years ago? Several hundred men in balaclavas blocking an A road are not the same as a party winning a landslide election. But both events draw on the idea that the political system has lost control. The extremists in Dover and Portsmouth dramatise this claim; the electoral result in Germany threatens to institutionalise it.
The prospect of Germany’s first far-right-led state government since the second world war carries real consequences. In Saxony-Anhalt it could see power handed to a party hostile to migrants, Islam, LGBTQ+ rights and climate policy. Alarmingly, it has senior figures linked to former neo-Nazi groups. About 170,000 foreign nationals live among 2 million people in Saxony-Anhalt – and roughly a fifth of the state’s doctors were born abroad. The grim paradox is that an AfD government could oversee the very state intelligence service that has classified the party as “rightwing extremist”.
In England, the “Patriot Platform” agitation is far-right vigilantism that claims it will “stop the boats” if the authorities won’t. The AfD is a political party which presents its success as a repudiation of established parties that, it claims, have failed – most notably on immigration. The intimidation seen in England and the AfD’s extremism are, however, two sides of the same coin: a broader politics in which migration is felt to embody a sense of powerlessness – not just over borders but over state institutions, economic change and national identity.
The AfD polls highest in Germany’s eastern states. These have a post-reunification history of population loss and high unemployment. Britain has its own political geography and history. The small boats are a live political issue. More than 33,000 people arrived by that route in the year to June 2026. Nearly all will claim asylum. But arrivals were 23% lower than the previous year. The street escalation is occurring as numbers are falling.
Across Europe, the far right keeps rising because immigration has become a test of whether states can still govern effectively. Cutting migrant numbers or asylum claims does not lessen the issue’s potency. Studies suggest that, in Germany, political alienation is more important to AfD support than deprivation. That is also why, in Britain, using facts alone – that crossings are falling, or that migrants aren’t responsible for NHS waiting lists or stagnant wages – may have little electoral effect. The reality answers the far right’s argument, but doesn’t dispel the deeper belief that the country is becoming ungovernable.
Borders, in that sense, are a symptom of a bigger problem: voters increasingly distrust democracy to make things happen for them. In Germany, politicians can point to the constitutional settlement and coalition arithmetic and say that their hands are tied. In Britain, they defer to the bond markets and the Bank of England. The language is different, but the message can sound the same: you can vote for change, but the government is limited in what it can achieve. The answer is not to pretend that inflation or legal constraints are irrelevant. It is to show that they do not amount to a permanent veto on democratic choice.
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