“The reason for this development is a deep economic and political crisis, to which the established parties have no answers.”
07 September 2026
The fact that the AfD can win a state election is not new. Already in 2024, the party led by Bjƶrn Hƶcke was far ahead of all other parties. The difference to Saxony-Anhalt: in 2024, it was still possible for the majority without the AfD. In Saxony-Anhalt, the "old order" was destroyed, writes the Neue ZĆ¼rich Zeitung, because "the signs in German politics have turned around: it is the AfD that invites talks, formulates conditions, draws red lines, and thinks about a minority government."
The reason for this development is a deep economic and political crisis, to which the established parties have no answers. Friedrich Merz had already insulted people as exploiters and angry citizens before the election, thereby showing that the Union is becoming a full-fledged crisis solver for the working class.
The statements of the other parties on election day did not go beyond technocratic and/or moral appeals. The Green party's leader, Franziska Brandtner, interpreted that people want "finally to be governed in a crafty way." And the entire top management of the SPD, down to the current chairman BƤrbel Bas, realized that the SPD (unlike the Merz-CDU) had "achieved a stable result."
The response shows how far the political system has moved away from the livelihoods of people. It is no coincidence that "social security" and "peace" were the two election-winning issues. Because the federal government is not responding with support, but with further social tightening measures. Those who, in a country where 42 percent of all pensioners are already living on a poverty pension of less than 1000 euros, are demanding significant pension cuts and savings in healthcare and healthcare, should not be surprised that they are no longer seen as the party of social justice.
Unfortunately, this also applies to the Left. The party has been achieving its worst results since 1990 and is also losing its status as the party of social justice in the eyes of voters. Here, the public-employed considerations to support a CDU government to prevent the AfD have not contributed at all to the emergence of this picture.
What drives people further - and this is especially true for East Germany - is the concern for war. After the drone discovery at Leipzig Airport, the federal government last week triggered an irresponsible escalation with Russia. The Left has not yet responded to this dangerous shift in discourse. And the election results show this: those who remain silent about peace also lose their profile as a party of social justice.
And so it may not have been a coincidence that all parties lost female voters to the AfD. The fact that they could ultimately present themselves as a party of peace and social justice was mainly due to the fact that they played the keyboard of political polarization and thereby became the party's political expression of a long-standing, simmering, and increasingly raging anger. 61 percent of AfD voters were workers, while the other parties were downright avoided by workers - this also applies to the Left, which never received as many votes from workers as it did in Saxony-Anhalt during this election.
The radicalization of the election results in Saxony-Anhalt is the result of a radicalization of real-life conditions that has been going on for almost 40 years. People in East Germany did not simply experience a bad governance change in the 1990s, they experienced a complete breakdown of the structure, which led to unemployment, low wages, and often to emigration of the young and mobile. And this is permanent. With a median gross income of only 3,563 euros per month, full-time employees in Saxony-Anhalt earn less than almost everywhere else in Germany. The devaluation of East German biographies was further exacerbated by the policy of the social Kahlshlag - this is also permanent, as the experience with the Agenda 2010 and the currently planned social cuts shows. A development that signals to people that politics not only ignores their concerns but also reacts to them with harsh social cuts.
The election results show that if a left-wing party does not respond to this social polarization with political polarization - if it does not, for example, stand in opposition to the political system on ALL issues - then social polarization will lead to the driver of a dramatic right-wing development. "The pendulum swung not only to the right in Saxony-Anhalt, but also across the center and left it a dangerous lesson: compromise as weakness, balance as betrayal," writes the NZZ. The fact that the Left is perceived as the party of the center in this deep systemic crisis of capitalism and not as an alternative to the ruling politics is the real problem with this election result and should be the basis for a careful manipulation critique.
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There is certainly not one single reason for the AfD's triumph in Saxony-Anhalt (44%), and people will make all kinds of analysis that places emphasis on this or that factor (salience of migration, regional grievances, racialised fears of downward social mobility etc.). That's perfectly fine.
But in my opinion, two things stand (or should stand) out in this election. One is the failure of different and often contradictory strategies meant to challenge the far right. The one (followed by Die Linke) was that of the "Brandmauer" ("firewall"), a strategy of uniting all "democratic" forces against the far right, albeit on a parliamentary basis of unity with the parties perceived as the establishment. So we had Die Linke's leader in neighbouring Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow, making a plea last August for a cooperation between the left and Christian Democracy. The other failed strategy is that pursued by Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW split from Die Linke, which has rapidly abandoned any left-wing pretense on a "neither left-nor-right"-basis of reaching out to the AfD.
Specifically for Die Linke, the result demonstrates how ephemeral the party's success was during the last general election. Die Linke has a pattern of scoring relatively well in general and European elections, while failing miserably on the state level outside of city-states like Berlin or Hamburg. This is because the party has not so much to say about, say, a factory being closed down because of higher energy costs due to sanctions against Russia other than abstractions about "social justice" and "redistribution".
The other highlight is the way that Germany's ruling CDU-led coalition (and the SPD-led coalition preceding it) have effectively acted as preparatory regimes for the current far-right wave. The arming of genocide, police repression, further restrictions in the asylum regime, deportation or stripping of citizenship as punishment for criticizing I*rael, a shift to social militarization and "preparedness" for a future war (which the AfD does not oppose in principle, even if for various reasons it does not share the anti-Russian thrust of these measures) - all these have normalised the kind of worldview the AfD pushes.
Here Die Linke has also been responsible. Acting as the "extreme left of what is permissible by liberal discourse", its leadership has been keen to show that it intends to channel its newly acquired political capital into respectable avenues". So, Die Linke's mayoral candidate for Berlin, despite all the cringeworthy Mamdani hype, and in breach of her own party's decisions, has recently thrown the Palestine solidarity movement under the bus by distancing herself from the slogan "Yalla yalla intifada".
It's not so much the case that the average AfD voter will be swayed to vote for the left if Die Linke has better politics on Palestine or Ukraine. But the only thing that can undercut the AfD's momentum, is an oppositional political subjectivity with an even bigger momentum, and that the left has miserably failed so far to create.
Simply put, the German left is pretty bad at doing politics, aka. creating sharp political antagonisms. That's why the strategic debate is (to my knowledge and crudely speaking) falsely polarised between those that want to pursue antifascist unity on a moral rather than class basis (if need be through coalition governments), and those that will only entertain antifascism if "one also talks about the system that generates fascism". I include in the later strand not only sectarians of all sorts but also essentially social democratic and academically hyped concepts such as an "antifascist economic policy", which effectively trace the origins of fascism in material deprivation rather than in ideological built-in mechanisms at the heart of the system.
I am not saying that there are easy ways out of the impasse, but political antagonisms have been staring us in the face for some time now: 1) a state born out of the historical responsibility of "never again" is arming and enabling a genocide condemned by the overwhelming majority of the planet; 2) a state that pledged that "no war should emanate from its soil" after 1945, is not only fueling a dangerous proxy war against a nuclear-armed Russia of all states, but is, to that end, also planning to reintroduce conscription and place the entire economy on a war footing.
These are not "normative" or "immaterial" issues, but affect the daily material lives of millions, within and outside of Germany.
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