Saxony-Anhalt could become the clearest example this Sunday of how far the strategy of Germany’s legacy parties to contain Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has ended up reshaping the country’s entire political system.
Polls put the party at around 40%, well ahead of the CDU, which comfortably won the 2021 regional election. The gap is now too large to dismiss the AfD as a marginal protest vote. The party is clearly on course to become the leading political force in the state.
That would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Now it could even secure enough seats to govern alone, depending on how many parties clear the 5% electoral threshold. It would be the first time the AfD controls a German state government.
But it does not even need to achieve that to emerge strengthened. And that is precisely the key to the party’s position.
If it wins the election without securing an absolute majority, that is when the real crisis will begin for the CDU. Friedrich Merz continues to categorically reject any agreement with the AfD, which would force the Christian Democrats in Saxony-Anhalt to seek some arrangement with the Social Democrats, the Greens or even some form of understanding with radical left-wing Die Linke in order to prevent the most-voted party from governing.
The more the AfD grows, therefore, the further left the CDU must move in order to exclude it, forcing Merz’s voters to ask themselves whether voting for his party makes sense at all.
That mechanism is feeding precisely the argument Berlin has spent years trying to combat. Elections may change the distribution of votes, but the coalitions formed afterwards allow the political dividing line between those who are permitted to govern and those who are not to remain intact.
The AfD has gone from 20.8% in Saxony-Anhalt in 2021 to now competing for almost twice that level of support. The strategy of isolation has so far prevented it from entering government, but it has not reduced its electoral support. Quite the opposite has happened.
For Merz, the problem is particularly serious. His promise to reclaim conservative ground from the AfD has failed to halt its growth, while the CDU in Eastern Germany is beginning to pay the price for a strategy largely decided in Berlin. Judging by his actions, he has done little to reclaim or even preserve that political space. If anything, quite the opposite.
After this weekend, the AfD will have demonstrated that it no longer needs to govern in order to shape the political system. It only needs to grow enough to force the other parties into increasingly artificial coalitions whose primary purpose is to keep it out. The mere existence and continued growth of the AfD serves to demonstrate in practice what the party has long argued politically.
And when a strategy designed to isolate one party ends up determining virtually every decision made by its opponents, it is worth asking who is really isolating whom.