Note: this article reflects only the author’s own views.

Saxony-Anhalt is a region in eastern Germany, the birthplace of Luther and Handel. It has a population of around two million.

This evening, in all likelihood, we will discover that the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland will have secured over 40% of the vote and an absolute majority of seats in the Landtag (i.e. the regional parliament) elections.

The news will leave right-thinking commentators across half of Europe bewildered, and will risk derailing the majority in Berlin that supports Chancellor Merz.

“Oh no, not Germany again!”

Theoretically, this is not the first time that a party funded by Russia, hostile to the European Union, fiercely anti-immigrant and with a fanciful idea of the rule of law wins a popular vote.

In recent decades, we have seen similar parties seize far more coveted prizes than a tiny patch of land around Magdeburg: Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Georgia, Italy with its ‘government of the people’ led by Conte, Salvini and Di Maio, and Trump’s second term in the US.

But Germany, as we know, is not regarded as a country like any other.

And, what is worse, it does not regard itself as a country like any other.

After its defeat in the last war, in fact, the victors condemned it to identify its past exclusively with Nazism, in perpetuity and without redemption.

Nazism was regarded as a sort of hereditary disease specific to the Germans. Their actions over previous centuries were retrospectively interpreted in the light of it. A new outbreak of it is still feared at any moment, always in Germany and only in Germany.

Such hateful treatment and such racist prejudice would have prompted outcry by any other people responsible for a past genocide, wherever they might be – from the Russians to the Zulus.

Only the Germans have chosen to accept this role – absurd and unique in the world – as the ‘healthy carriers’ of a murderous dictatorship.

And so here we are: tomorrow morning, the AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt will not be described by the press as one of the many successes of the populist right, but as the prelude to a return of parades in brown shirts.

Because the Germans, you know, are not like the other people: ‘deep down, they have always been a bit Nazi’.

The wind from the East

Anyone who wants to join in this chorus is welcome to do so.
For my part, I prefer to try and offer a slightly more honest and nuanced interpretation of the AfD’s current success.

Let’s start with the most obvious fact. The hotbed of its growth lies in the eastern Länder, where Alice Weidel and her colleagues now consistently enjoy support of over 40%.

In short, the AfD has now become the ‘national party’ of the former East Germany.
Such dynamic is partly reminiscent of that of the M5S in southern Italy (the only difference is that the AfD is campaigning to abolish the universal basic income, accusing it of coming too close to the wages paid for exhausting jobs such as nursing).

Resentment in the East towards the West is, in fact, long-standing.

It began as early as the 1990s, when industries in the former communist country chose to relocate to the West or were bought out at rock-bottom prices by large Western conglomerates.
This was followed by a massive wave of migration to the West, a decline in birth rates compared with those in the West. A vicious circle that made the eastern provinces increasingly irrelevant: today, between the Elbe and the Oder – excluding Berlin – lives barely 15% of the German population.

On a cultural level, too, it isn’t pleasant to feel like second-class citizens in a state that already feels like a second-class nation itself, due to the usual ‘original sin’ with the moustache.

Moreover, East Germany, being a totalitarian regime, taught its subjects to worship the motherland. Then, once incorporated into the West, those same citizens found a democracy that taught them to be ashamed of their motherland.
Is it any wonder that they now feel nostalgia for their old totalitarian homeland while feeling shame for their new democratic one?

They are doing nothing other than what they were told to do.

Is it any wonder that AfD candidates, who on paper would be considered far-right, turn up at rallies whizzing along on scooters from the communist era and sing the GDR anthem?

Procession of Saxon AfD candidates riding Simson motorbikes, icons of the Communist era

Despite all this, in the last election Saxony-Anhalt still backed the Christian Democratic Union, giving it 37% of the vote compared with 20,8% per cent for the AfD.

Today, the situation has been reversed.
Post-unification resentment, it seems, does not explain everything.

An unprecedented crisis

It must be added, in fact, a widespread economic discontent.

From 2022 to the present day, the three pillars on which Germany had built its growth have collapsed in rapid succession: Putin as a gas supplier, China as an export market and America as a military protector.

It would still have been possible to weather the storm, had it not been for a self-harming ideological campaign that convinced Merkel and then Scholz to shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants, right in the midst of the worst energy crisis of the last half-century.

Quarter after quarter, German manufacturing has slowed down increasingly, with entire factories closing down, whilst – given that this was an exogenous shock – the cost of living soared regardless.

Chancellor Merz is attempting both to build an autonomous defence system and to open up new markets in the Global South (on nuclear power, unfortunately, his hands are tied by the veto of his socialist government allies).
He is attempting to save the welfare state through a reckless semi-privatisation of pensions.
These efforts are not in vain: by mid-2026, the economy has finally returned to growth.

But the benefits, if they are to be reaped, will only be felt in the medium term.
In the short term, discontent persists, and the siren calls of populism continue to hold sway.

A caliphate in Germany? Nein, danke

But the beating heart of the AfD’s rhetoric is the campaign for ‘remigration’.

The proposal is well known: to repatriate all non-EU citizens and make it easier to revoke the citizenship of naturalised citizens. Until recently it would have been unthinkable in a country which, for eighty years, has held up racism as the worst of all crimes in its public discourse and school curricula.

If we are to understand such a sudden reversal, we cannot let sentimentality cloud our judgement: we must honestly examine what has changed in recent years.

My impression is that, in Germany as in the rest of Europe, attitudes towards immigration are increasingly shaped by a factor that is neither racial nor economic, but ideological: Islam.

For decades, the presence of sizeable Islamic minorities had been causing public order problems. Already in 2016, Cologne suffered a mass sexual assault on New Year’s Eve and Berlin the massacre at the Christian market. Back then, there were already intractable dilemmas over how to reconcile Western freedoms with the tribal and misogynistic family law of Sharia.

But the war in Gaza and the media hype that followed have caused the situation to come to a head, by sparking a genuine surge of defiance among many Muslim communities.

Last year, the Home Office had to shut down a network active on TikTok and Instagram that was promoting the creation of a caliphate in Germany, organising even public demonstrations for this goal.

When a van was driven into young people at Berlin Pride, it was no longer credible to claim that this was the delusion of an isolated madman.
Millions of Germans, rightly or wrongly, saw that act as a consequence of a general climate that was spreading amongst Islamic communities.

The terms of the issue, therefore, are no longer the same as they were ten years ago.

Even back then, the AfD was against immigration, and it was so out of ethnic prejudice.
But today it is lucky enough to take that stance as a self-defence against an organised political ideology that is hostile to the Federal Republic.

And this message, even in humble and ever-penitent Germany, is striking a chord.

Plus, another side-effect of the collective frenzy over Gaza should not be underestimated.
In fact, it has broken the taboo surrounding hatred toward Jews, stripping the far right of its shameful monopoly on it. Suddenly, the far right started to appear more presentable.

It would have been hard to do them a bigger favour.

Alice Weidel, leader of the AfD, is married to Sarah Bossard, a Swiss film producer of Sri Lankan origin. Together they are raising two children.

Ethnic prejudice is playing an even-decreasing role in shaping the anti-immigration stance of the AfD and its supporters.

Dad, how do I become a man?

The latest figure is the one that strikes me most as a secondary school teacher: the AfD is hugely popular amongst young men.

In fact, its youth wing is the real testing ground where – to the beat of techno music – veiled references are made to Nazi aesthetics, to such an extent that the ‘adult’ party has decided to shut it down in order to avoid legal problems.  

But the hardships of being a young man in Germany are unimaginable to those who do not live there.

Let’s just think that among the AfD’s election pledges is ‘to focus school curricula on Germany’s past glories and not just on the horrors of Nazism’: a matter of course in any other country, yet one regarded as a controversial proposal by Germany’s mainstream parties.

In fact, the radicalism – and the impunity – with which national identity has been erased in German schools would be appalling if it had been directed against any indigenous or colonised people.

Teachers are reluctant to tell about Bismarck, who is accused of having already exhibited proto-Nazi traits.
The difference between Lutherans and Catholics is unknown to most.
No pupil, whatever their stream, could quote a thesis by Kant or Nietzsche.   
On the other hand, there are schools where, for a whole year, pupils study the history of Russia and China , ‘weighing up the pros and cons of Mao’s policies’.

The reductio ad Hitlerum, however, does not affect only schools but harms everyday life.

Waving the national tricolour at the stadium is viewed with suspicion.
Dressing elegantly is frowned upon.
Any hint of strength, discipline or honour is immediately tainted with the whiff of the Reich.

A documentary, some years ago, showed the existence of paid ‘masculinity camps’, where men went to freely explore their nature in a safe environment and to finally develop a bit of self-esteem.

For people born in the 2000s, all this is, obviously, incomprehensible.

Because of a regime created by their great-great-grandparents born in the 19th century, now they find themselves caged within a society that brands as shameful everything their instincts would lead them to be.

But instinct, as we know, cannot be suppressed.

If democratic Germany leaves no avenue open for young men to feel capable, brave, proud of themselves and loyal to their homeland, they turn to social media, join the AfD, and find the only available ideological framework to fulfil this need.
Which, unfortunately, is precisely the Nazi or para-Nazi one.

After all, if for eighty years your government, your teachers and everyone else in the world have kept telling you that deep down you’re a Nazi, why not just give them what they want by actually becoming one?

Conclusion

Suffering does not justify wrongdoing.
In my view, anyone who votes for the AfD is inexcusable.

In response to the problems I have listed, it would be far more rational to vote for the Christian Democrats – all the more so now that, under Merz, they have adopted a more combative stance than they did under Merkel.

Perhaps, once the worst of the economic crisis has passed, support for the AfD will wane.

But one thing remains certain: a country scarred by decades of self-censorship regarding its identity – particularly amongst its younger and more marginalised sections – can always spring a nasty surprise.