German Establishment Responds To Its Ballot Box Drubbing In Most Predictable Way Possible

Germany’s political establishment is scrambling for answers after the right-wing Alternative for Germany dealt Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives a historic electoral defeat.

The right-wing AfD (Alternative for Germany) party captured 43.8% of the statewide second vote in Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt election, compared with 17.2% for Merz’s conservative-leaning Christian Democratic Union, according to the state of Saxony-Anhalt. Merz responded by declaring that Germany’s political class was “deeply shocked” and suggesting he needed to better connect with voters emotionally, Politico reported.

Yet the shock comes after years in which Germany’s political establishment embraced mass migration, pursued energy policies that helped drive up costs and empowered domestic intelligence authorities to monitor the AfD, controversies that have fueled voter anger and become central to the party’s rise.

“AfD’s success in Sunday’s local elections is a clear indication of frustration amongst some German voters in the leadership of Merz and CDU and SPD,” Daniel Kochis, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Migration is clearly the issue which has raised the temperature in the pot, however, anemic growth, high energy prices, largescale layoffs, in a word economic uncertainty is what caused the water to run over in this instance.”

Only 9% of Saxony-Anhalt voters viewed Merz’s political performance positively, according to an election-day survey conducted by Infratest dimap for ARD. Merz said he needed to connect “more deeply with people” and later emphasized “compassion, empathy, and emotions” as his government searched for a response, according to Politico.

“There is broad dissatisfaction (and a lack of trust, especially in the east) with the Merz government and the CDU to get much accomplished,” Jonathan Olsen, a political science professor who specializes in German politics and far-right movements, told the DCNF. “Migration is, of course, the calling card issue for the AfD … among AfD voters it’s still a central issue, inasmuch as migration is a stand-in for cultural identity issues. That is to say, for the party and its voters, it’s not a question of this or that number of migrants let into the country but a broader question of the meaning of German identity.”

“I guess, some of these issues might be brought up by the Chancellor himself in tomorrow‘s Generaldebatte at the Bundestag, starting around 9:20 a.m. CEST (Central European Standard Time),” Sebastian Feldmeier, senior press officer with the Press and Information Office of the German Federal Government, told the DCNF.

Alternative for Germany office did not respond to requests for comment.

“We must not simply return to business as usual after such a result,” Gordon Schnieder, the CDU state premier of Rhineland-Palatinate, posted on X in German. “If the democratic center wants to regain trust, we must start with ourselves.”

“Anyone who wants to regain trust and credibility must, after such a result, question everything,” CDU lawmaker Sepp Müller posted on X in German. “And have the courage to do things fundamentally differently.”

The result follows more than a decade of upheaval over immigration in Germany. The country initially registered roughly 1.09 million asylum-seeker arrivals through its EASY distribution system during the 2015 migration crisis, while asylum applications more than doubled from the previous year, according to Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.

The migration surge also coincided with a sharp increase in the share of violent-crime suspects who were not German citizens. Non-Germans accounted for 28.8% of violent-crime suspects in 2014, rising to 33.2% in 2015 and 38.1% in 2016, according to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office.

Vice President JD Vance confronted European leaders during a Feb. 14, 2025, address to the Munich Security Conference in Germany, telling the gathering of political and national security officials that there was “nothing more urgent than mass migration” and arguing that Europe’s migration problems stemmed from deliberate policy choices made over the previous decade.

Vance also directly attacked the practice of politically isolating parties such as the AfD, warning German leaders against disregarding millions of voters whose views they opposed. “There is no room for firewalls,” Vance said, according to the American Presidency Project. The vice president did not respond to a request for comment.

“Of course, Vance and the Trump administration would like to see the AfD in power because it shares some commonalities with other European populist right-wing parties (e.g., FIDESZ in Hungary) which the administration sees as kindred spirits,” Olsen told the DCNF.

Germany’s major parties have nevertheless continued refusing to cooperate with the AfD, leaving the party short of control in Saxony-Anhalt despite winning 39 of the legislature’s 83 seats, according to Reuters. AfD leaders are now attempting to attract conservative lawmakers while Merz has maintained the firewall, Reuters reported.

The AfD has simultaneously faced years of scrutiny from Germany’s domestic intelligence apparatus. A German appeals court ruled in 2024 that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution could continue treating the AfD as a suspected extremist organization and subjecting it to surveillance, including wiretapping, Reuters reported.

“You have to remember that over half of voters in Saxony-Anhalt do NOT want to see any cooperation with the AfD (the other half do, and these are presumably AfD voters and perhaps some voters for the CDU or BSW),” Olsen told the DCNF. “In Germany as a whole it’s even higher: somewhere around 65-70% of voters nationwide do not want the other parties to cooperate with the AfD because of its various stances on migration, LGBTQ rights, Russia-friendly attitudes, a very conservative view of German history, tolerance of some very extreme elements in the AfD with associations to National Socialism, etc.”

Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) escalated its assessment in May 2025 by classifying the entire AfD as an “extremist” organization, opening the door to expanded surveillance of the party. A Cologne court temporarily blocked the agency from applying that designation to the entire party in February 2026, finding insufficient evidence to generalize extremist conduct across the whole organization while saying strong suspicions remained regarding some officials.

The AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch, however, remains classified as extremist by the state’s domestic intelligence service, a characterization the party rejects as politically motivated, Reuters reported.

Germany has also wrestled with persistent economic and energy pressures. The country shut its final three commercial nuclear reactors in April 2023, completing a yearslong nuclear phaseout shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended Germany’s longstanding reliance on cheap Russian energy, according to Germany’s Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management.

“I would caution against extrapolating the results in Saxony-Anhalt to the rest of the country, but there is an obvious anti-incumbent mood driven by the economic problems of the nation and over a decade of largescale migration and its impact on the nation, in neither case does relief seem close on the horizon,” Kochis told the DCNF.

German industrial production has declined every year since 2022, with high energy, labor and regulatory costs eroding the country’s competitiveness, Reuters reported in April, citing the Federation of German Industries. The industry group warned that German manufacturing could contract for a fifth consecutive year in 2026.

Those energy pressures have not disappeared. German gas storage stood at just 53% on Sept. 1, its lowest level in 15 years, while European gas prices climbed to their highest point since January 2023 amid renewed geopolitical turmoil, according to Reuters.

Merz, meanwhile, has acknowledged that his own leadership contributed to the CDU’s collapse but has given no indication that Germany’s establishment parties will abandon the firewall separating them from the AfD, according to Politico.

The AfD has proposed a substantial shift in Germany’s approach to Russia. The party’s 2025 federal election platform calls for immediately lifting economic sanctions against Moscow, repairing the Nord Stream pipelines and expanding economic relations with Russia, while arguing that Ukraine should remain outside NATO and the European Union, according to the AfD’s 2025 federal election program.

The party has taken a similarly engagement-focused approach toward Beijing, calling for expanded economic, scientific and cultural ties with China and seeking to take advantage of opportunities created by Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, while also demanding protections against the loss of German technology and strategic industries, according to the AfD’s platform.

Germany’s economic relationship with China, however, was deeply entrenched long before the AfD’s latest rise. China had been Germany’s largest trading partner since 2015, while German industrial giants such as Volkswagen built enormous businesses in the country before increasingly facing competition from Chinese companies, the Wall Street Journal reported.

That competition is now hitting Germany’s flagship auto industry at home and abroad. Volkswagen is pursuing a sweeping restructuring that could ultimately eliminate as many as 100,000 jobs as the automaker struggles with Chinese rivals, high costs and its expensive transition toward electric vehicles, the WSJ reported in September.

“I’m not sure how much AfD’s weekend success is a voter reaction to the firewall of the centrist parties in Germany vis a vis AfD but rather more a message from voters that on some key issues, they don’t see progress moving quickly enough and are willing to move in different directions with their votes to seek change,” Kochis told the DCNF. “In a national election, these issues remain impactful, but AfD’s proposals for closer relations with China and Russia at a time of severe contestation if not outright war with those countries occurring every day also gets an airing and could also keep voters in more traditional camps, especially in those regions farther West whether AfD has never been particularly strong.”