The far-right Alternative for Germany surged to a record 44 per cent in regional elections in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday — its best-ever result.
The success has some local dimensions. The state of 2.1mn, once part of communist East Germany, is much older, more rural and less prosperous than the average in the EU’s largest economy, a nation of 83mn people.
But it is also part of a much broader trend that has seen the anti-migration, pro-Russian AfD surge to second place in last year’s national elections. It is now leading in national polls after overtaking Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU).
“What happened in Saxony-Anhalt is quite similar to what is happening in Germany nationwide — but on steroids,” said Reto Mitteregger, a political scientist at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Age, gender and the east-west divide
Although the AfD has been making gains in western Germany, the former East remains its stronghold.
That can be partly explained by a raft of socio-economic factors.
Eastern states have lower levels of average income and wealth. They suffered an exodus in the 1990s and today struggle with population decline and worker shortages. Working-age men — a group more likely to vote AfD — outnumber working-age women, who are more likely to leave the region to take up jobs elsewhere.
Many in the region feel sympathy towards Russia, putting them at odds with Merz’s pro-Ukraine stance and aligning them with the Moscow-friendly AfD.
Another crucial factor is that traditional centrist parties have weaker roots in eastern states, where there were no free elections for four decades until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
“The [established] parties’ integration into society in eastern Germany was always much weaker,” said Lukas Haffert, a professor of comparative politics at the University of Bremen. “In the west you still have tonnes of people who vote how they always did.”
Across Germany, two-thirds of people aged over 70 voted for either the centre-right CDU or the centre-left SPD in last year’s Bundestag election. That compares with 24 per cent of those aged 18 to 24.
The AfD has performed best — both on a regional and national level — among working-age voters (35 to 59).
Older voters’ resistance to the far right makes Haffert sceptical of the target set this week by AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, who said she wanted the party to win 40 per cent of the national vote at the next election in 2029. “I don’t think that’s possible because we still have enough boomers in the west,” he said. But when they die, “that’s a bulwark that’s going to disappear”.
Mobilising non-voters
The AfD and its lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund, a photogenic former room fragrance salesman, succeeded in massively mobilising people who had stayed home in previous elections. The party’s estimated net gain from former non-voters was 170,000 — equivalent to about 30 per cent of its total 576,000 votes. The majority of them came from rural areas or small towns.
The pattern was also visible in last year’s federal election, though on a less dramatic scale: most of the AfD’s new supporters were previous non-voters, followed by disillusioned former CDU voters.
In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD was helped by the lack of a popular incumbent. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which votes on September 20, looks different: polls put the AfD first, but state premier Manuela Schwesig’s centre-left Social Democrats are expected to win enough votes to build a coalition.
Capitalising on migration fears
Originally founded in 2013 in response to the Eurozone bailout of Greece, the AfD later switched focus to make migration its primary issue. It seized upon unease caused by Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to open the doors to around 1mn asylum seekers, mostly from the Middle East.
A sense of fear and insecurity over migration, compounded by a series of Islamist attacks in recent years, was a recurrent theme on the campaign trail in Saxony-Anhalt.
Melissa Wölfel, a 28-year-old from the small town of Bad Kösen, said that she and her family yearned for days when people “were not afraid to send their kids outside on their own”. The number of recorded crimes in the precinct around the spa town has fallen by 25 per cent over the past decade, according to police statistics.
In Saxony-Anhalt around 8 per cent of residents are foreign nationals — roughly half the nationwide level.
Mitteregger, the Humboldt University political scientist, said that there was a “paradox that we see throughout Europe: people vote for the far right in places where there is not much immigration”.
He said: “People become more pro-immigration when they interact with migrants, for example if their kids have foreign-born friends.”
Industry gloom
The AfD has been gaining support not only in deprived areas but also in Germany’s automotive heartlands, where manufacturers are under pressure from Chinese competition, the shift to electric vehicles, high energy prices and US tariffs.
Daniel Posch, an economist at the Bertelsmann Stiftung, a think-tank, said voters in manufacturing areas “anticipate status loss or economic loss — or both”. He said: “There doesn’t need to be an actual decline, just the perception or fear.”
Posch said the pattern was particularly strong in areas with energy-intensive industries, where workers feel “status loss and stigmatisation that the work they are doing is no longer relevant”.
The trend is especially pronounced in the former East Germany, which has fewer big companies and lower productivity. But he said it was also appearing in southern industrial powerhouses such as Baden-Württemberg — home to Mercedes-Benz and Porsche — where the AfD doubled its share of the vote in state elections in March to 19 per cent.
The rural-urban divide
Across Germany, the AfD performs better in rural areas and smaller towns than in big cities. In Saxony-Anhalt, that divide was even sharper. “Urban-rural divides are generally much bigger in the east than in the west,” said Haffert, the Bremen University professor. In Sunday’s election, he said, “the enormous increase in turnout largely happened in rural areas”.
Haffert, an expert on urban-rural inequalities, sees population decline as one of the region’s most distinctive factors. Saxony-Anhalt has lost about a quarter of its population since 1990.
He said voters might not necessarily identify depopulation as a source of their discontent, but “it explains why they are upset: shops close, places decay”.
The urban-rural divide is less pronounced in the west, he said, where smaller places tend to have a “much more solid economic and demographic base”. They might be home to one of Germany’s Mittelstand companies making machine tools exported around the world.
Haffert acknowledged that many such businesses were now also struggling — and that the west was catching up with the east in its support for the AfD.
“It would be a fair interpretation to say: growing anxiety over the China shock, automation, AI and the future of the German economic model may partly explain why the AfD is now also performing well in the west.”
