After the votes in the state election in Saxony-Anhalt were counted, preliminary official results show that the AfD has won a crushing electoral victory with 43.8 per cent of the vote. If the votes for the CDU, SPD, Die Linke and the Greens are added together, the four parties have a combined 44.0 per cent.
Chew on that figure for a moment: The AfD has practically as much support as the established political class combined, and came within a hair’s breadth of winning an outright majority.
Such an outcome is now ruled out, given that Sahra Wagenknecht’s left-wing populist party, contrary to recent opinion polls, received 5.3 per cent of the vote, thereby clearing the electoral threshold. The AfD thus looks set to win 39 of the 83 seats in the state parliament instead of 41, as would probably have been the case without BSW.
A large right-wing populist party and a small left-wing populist party thus received a combined 49.1 per cent of the vote. It is a harsh verdict on Germany’s political class.
The result also means that BSW now holds the balance of power: The party could, in principle, help the AfD into power in the state. And such an outcome is conceivable. AfD leader Alice Weidel has indeed said that the election in Saxony-Anhalt has ended with a clear mandate for her party to govern.
That is not necessarily a comfortable outcome for the AfD’s lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund. As leader of a minority government, he would face major difficulties in realising the party’s ambitions.
But perhaps it would be worth it. The AfD could thus have the opportunity to demonstrate that it is perfectly capable of administering a state.
The task would probably be complicated by ostracism from the rest of official Germany – just as the EU did with Austria after the Freedom Party entered government there a quarter of a century ago.
But yesterday’s election was not primarily a portent of major changes in Saxony-Anhalt in particular. The AfD’s triumph shows that the politicians who set about abolishing Germany are in the process of being replaced. They have been weighed and found wanting. It is a peaceful and democratic response from voters to politicians who are in the midst of destroying the country – and to authorities and media that are trying to convince them that their preferred party is far-right.
And this response is only going to grow stronger. If the AfD does not gain power in a state tomorrow, it will soon do so elsewhere in Germany, and eventually throughout Germany.
The only thing that can change this is for the grassroots of the CDU to rid themselves of their own power elite and once again become a sensible party – something that several people in Norway would quite certainly wish for Høyre as well.
The AfD’s success forms part of a very powerful European trend that will only continue: People across large parts of Western Europe are moving to the right.
In Spain, everything points to an alliance between the old and new right knocking the Social Democrats off their perch in 2027. Everything also points to Marine Le Pen becoming France’s next president next year. Giorgia Meloni will then also have a good chance of being re-elected in Italy.
Those are three of Europe’s five most populous countries. The two largest, Germany and the United Kingdom, are expected to hold parliamentary elections in 2029, unless their weak governments throw in the towel before then. Austria will also hold an election that year, where the Freedom Party now has close to 40 per cent in the opinion polls and will therefore be difficult to bypass the next time government power is to be distributed.
‘Saxony-Anhalt is everywhere’, comments Harald Martenstein in Die Welt: The political centre of gravity is shifting to the right. He also believes he can detect a new zeitgeist, a change in mood, a ‘vibe shift’. People understand that Nazism is not returning, even though the ruling class has used this spectre for years. The AfD will neither criminalise homosexuals, chain women to the cooker nor deport legal, law-abiding immigrants. It is not easy to paint such a picture when Alice Weidel lives with a woman from Sri Lanka.
We have, admittedly, acquired a new Nazism in Europe, but its name is Islam, and with the Palestinian cause as its spearhead it has also turned a horrifying number of native Europeans into antisemites.
And the person who, more than anyone else, paved the way for this new Nazism in Europe is Angela Merkel, who has made the greatest contribution towards ensuring that ‘Deutschland schafft sich ab’, to use Thilo Sarrazin’s expression – you know, the man who was cast out into the cold for stating the obvious.
The ‘firewall’ has now been exposed as a stupid and self-destructive strategy. Merz can hardly appear in public from now on without the sight of him immediately prompting the association ‘fool’.
People have abandoned established political parties because they have a sense that these parties are to blame for their losing their country, and they have turned to the AfD because the party gives them some hope that perhaps they will not lose it completely.
That feeling is not confined to Germany. You can see it yourself almost everywhere in Norway, if you look for it.
