The central German state of Saxony-Anhalt goes to the polls on Sunday in an election of much more than local interest. It has attracted worldwide attention because it represents the far right’s best chance yet of seizing control of a state government.
The last election in Saxony-Anhalt, five years ago, was something of a setback for the extremists (read my report here); despite having run close to the Christian Democrats (CDU) in the opinion polls, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) finished 16 points behind them, 20.8% to 37.1%, dropping two seats. The CDU formed a coalition government with the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Liberals (FDP), the three parties between them having 56 of the 97 seats.
You can follow that government’s fortunes through Wikipedia’s neat graph of the opinion polls. Basically AfD quickly recovered some ground, but remained behind the CDU until the early part of last year. Then something happened. AfD’s trajectory since has been steadily up and the CDU’s relentlessly down, until the gap between them is now of the order of twenty points.
Nor is it hard to work out what that something was. Early last year there was a change of federal government; a centre-left coalition (SPD, Greens and FDP) gave way to a grand coalition between CDU and SPD headed by prime minister Friedrich Merz, whose unpopularity is now at record levels. Not only has that hurt the CDU directly, it has also indirectly benefited AfD by way of the boost to its status gained from being the official opposition in Berlin.
This is the big problem of grand coalitions, as we have noted here a number of times. By bringing the mainstream forces under the one label they force discontented voters to go outside the mainstream and therefore give credibility to the extremists. Often you end up with effectively just two sides, of which only one can safely be allowed to govern – which is a recipe for disaster. (That hasn’t stopped German politicians from trying to recreate the same situation in the European parliament.)
But what else can you do? If the far right is polling around 40%, as it is in Saxony-Anhalt, there is no realistic alternative to either admitting it to power or else having all the other available forces combine against it. It’s not even certain that the other parties between them will have a majority. If the Greens, who won six seats last time, drop below the 5% threshold (as the FDP almost certainly will), it’s possible that AfD will be able to outvote the combination of CDU, SPD and the far-left Left party.
The CDU has promised not to co-operate with either AfD or the Left, but it and the Left have both signalled that they could live with an informal arrangement in which the Left supports a minority CDU-led government from opposition. That was the eventual outcome of the 2024 election in neighboring Thuringia, the first time that AfD won a plurality; the Left, to its credit, has (unlike its predecessor in the 1930s) shown no inclination to co-operate with the far-right to overthrow democracy.
Two weeks later, on 20 September, there’ll be another state election, in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, with much the same dynamics (although there the SPD rather than CDU are the incumbents). Unless there’s a sea change in German politics, one day the luck of the mainstream parties is going to run out, and some state will get to try the experiment of an AfD government.
The World is Not Enough 
