Earlier this month, the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) threw an Election Night victory celebration at a restaurant in Erfurt, the capital of the state of Thuringia. It was a distinctly private affair. The Party had preëmptively barred some news organizations from attending, which prompted a court challenge. Despite a ruling that the organizations must be allowed in, the AfD, citing space concerns, extended the ban to all media. So the TV crews were out in front, under the glower of security guards. A large police presence kept everyone else even further off—hundreds of protesters were gathered near the state legislative building, more than half a kilometre away. “Haven’t we learned our history? Didn’t we always say, ‘Never again’?” a member of Omas gegen Rechts (Grannies Against the Right), a nationwide anti-AfD group, demanded. “Well, ‘Never again’ is now.”
After a while, Stephan Brandner emerged from the restaurant. Brandner represents Thuringia in the Bundestag, the national parliament, and is one of the Party’s three deputy federal spokespeople. He is suited to the role of unthreatening front man: with his rimless glasses, blue blazer, baggy jeans, and affable manner, he could have been at a 2004 fund-raiser for George W. Bush in Charlotte. Only his small lapel pin signalled where we were: “Der Osten Machts!” (“The East Does It!”)
On this day, the east had in fact done it. In one interview after another, Brandner crowed about the Party’s showing. In Thuringia, it had received roughly a third of the vote—the first time it had scored the highest tally in a state election. In the neighboring state of Saxony, it had done nearly as well, getting about thirty per cent for a close second to the center-right Christian Democratic Union. (The AfD has historically had a stronger base in the eastern regions of the country than in the west, but never before at this level.) These results, Brandner declared, represented a rebuke to the years-long effort to cast the Party as part of a radical fringe, to the fire wall maintained by other parties to keep it out of governing coalitions, to the determination by the state security agency that the Party’s branches in Thuringia and Saxony were so extreme as to require surveillance. “This fable of ‘right-wing extremist,’ ” Brandner said, “many in Thuringia saw right through that.” He went on, “We are the democratic party and the democratic force in Thuringia.”
It was not hard to imagine the headlines that were, by this point, already caroming across the world, charged with dark historical association: a far-right party triumphs, again, in Germany. The AfD, born in 2013 in opposition to the country’s bailouts of fellow European Union members after the financial crisis, had quickly evolved to focus on resisting the migrant surge that began nearly a decade ago, with frequently nationalistic and racist overtones. The Party’s victory arrived “on the 85th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland,” a columnist wrote in the Financial Times.
But I had spent enough days in Thuringia prior to the election, and enough time in Saxony several years earlier, that I knew the story was more complicated. What has been happening in Germany—especially in the states of former East Germany, but also elsewhere—is a wholesale institutional fracturing accelerated by the stresses of recent years: the COVID pandemic, the continued influx of migrants and refugees, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
When I was last reporting in Germany, in late 2021, it seemed that the country might just be able to handle the first two of these stressors. A new government came to power that fall, with Olaf Scholz, of the center-left Social Democrats, installed as Chancellor in coalition with the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats. There were happy photos of the “traffic light” triumvirate, so named for their party colors, and talk of an economic miracle to blossom from ambitious plans for a renewable-energy transition.
Then came the war in Ukraine, and the resulting spike in energy prices and military spending, and today that coalition is stumbling badly toward next year’s federal elections amid a prevailing sense of national brokenness. The trains are late, manufacturers are shuttering plants, the kids aren’t learning, doctors are leaving the profession. There is talk of broader demoralization, a “quiet quitting” of sorts—Germans, once so proud of their work ethic, now put in fewer hours on average than their counterparts in most other wealthy nations.
The recent elections laid bare just how dire things are now for the traffic-light coalition: in Thuringia, both the Free Democrats and the Greens failed to make the five-per-cent threshold needed to obtain any seats at all; the Social Democrats barely squeaked in. In other words, in a state of slightly more than two million people, in the geographic heart of the country, the three governing parties will barely exist.
The old order is crumbling, and the AfD is not the only beneficiary. As telling as its triumph was the bravura début of a party founded by Sahra Wagenknecht, a longtime leftist and former Communist who abandoned her comrades to offer a new, potent mix of policies from across the traditional political spectrum: demands for economic justice alongside anti-woke jibes and calls for migrant limits and peace negotiations with Russia.
The dynamic was reminiscent of what I had observed while reporting on the rise of Donald Trump in the American Midwest in 2016—above all, the disconnect between voters in left-behind places and the highly educated winners of the metropolis. What sets the situation in Germany apart, in addition to the dark historical context, is the multiplicity and transparency of the rupture. In the U.S., the growing regional disconnect has been flattened under the weight of Trump’s cult of personality, obscuring the realignment under way in both major parties. But, in a multiparty parliamentary system like Germany’s, the rifts and tensions are easier to discern. They are out in the open, striations of a Western democracy under strain.
In Thuringia, Germany’s contradictions are especially dense. It is the region where Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German in his refuge at the castle of Wartburg; it was home to Goethe, Schiller, and the astonishing Romantic cluster in Jena—Schlegel, Schelling, and Fichte, among others. On the hills above Goethe’s Weimer sits the Buchenwald concentration camp; in Erfurt, Topf & Sons manufactured ovens and gas-chamber-ventilation systems for the death camps. Also in Erfurt, in December, 1989, some brave citizens were the first in East Germany to demand that the Stasi stop destroying its files.
Today, Thuringia is also home to one of the most notorious figures in the AfD, Björn Höcke, who leads the Party in the state legislature and has lately been in court to fight charges, which he denies, of having deliberately used a Nazi slogan, “Alles für Deutschland.” In a party in which some leaders come across as conventional and technocratic, Höcke, a history teacher by training, stands out for his willingness to flirt with the sort of nationalistic rhetoric and charismatic style that set off alarm bells in Germany.
Four days before the election, I arrived in Zella-Mehlis, a town of less than fifteen thousand people in the hills, an hour south of Erfurt, in hopes of catching Thomas Luhn, an AfD candidate who was campaigning there. I found him awkwardly posing for a photographer, who had Luhn, a balding, melancholy-looking fifty-six-year-old, standing in profile in front of an AfD backdrop. “Give us something forward-looking!” the photographer coaxed.
Luhn urged me to take a copy of the state party program, which was more than a hundred and forty pages long, and ranged far beyond migrant restrictions to include proposals on bringing down energy costs, balanced budgets, protection of the Thuringian landscape, and promotion of “close-to-home tourism.” Luhn insisted, “We are a party of the right, not an extreme-right party.” He wished that the state legislature could function like the town government in nearby Suhl, which he is part of, and where Christian Democrats and AfD members coöperate on local issues, such as social services and economic development. “Working together like that—that should be a requirement,” he said.
I asked him about the story that had been dominating the news, the arrest of a twenty-six-year-old Syrian man in the aftermath of a knife rampage that killed three and injured eight in the western city of Solingen, on August 23rd. He demurred, saying that he didn’t want to be seen as capitalizing on a tragedy. (In contrast, the Party’s national co-leader, Alice Weidel, had called for an immediate ban for at least five years on immigration and naturalization after the attack.) I came at the subject another way: What did he make of the argument that Germany, and especially the underpopulated east, should welcome new arrivals to make up for labor shortages? (Six million people migrated to Germany between 2013 and 2022; nearly one in five inhabitants is now foreign-born, a higher share than in the U.S.)
This, he contested with alacrity. “We need people to come here, sure, but the government mixes asylum and skilled immigration in one pot,” he said. “They let people in blindly, people who claim asylum to get across the border, and then they call this ‘skilled labor.’ ” He went on, “I’ve been in Arab countries often, and I had to follow the laws and protocols, and when people come here they must do the same. Everyone who breaks the law has lost his right to be here.” Left unstated was that the eastern states where the AfD is strongest also have far lower rates of immigration than almost anywhere else in the country.
I asked why his party was especially strong in Thuringia, and he grew even more animated as he invoked the Party’s leader in the state: “Björn Höcke is such a strong man—he is, in my opinion, one of the greatest politicians this country has ever seen and ever will see.” He conceded that Höcke was, for even some fellow-conservatives, a “matter of taste,” partly because he had been “demonized” by a media that scoured his every utterance for Third Reich echoes. (Once, Höcke ended an interview early after the broadcaster showed clips of AfD lawmakers unable to distinguish between quotes from Höcke and Hitler.) But Luhn had made up his own mind about him, and so would voters, he said, who no longer viewed as reliable arbiters the established parties or a news media inclined to cosset them. “We have common sense, and we have a sense of justice,” he said.
A short while later, I fell into a conversation with a retired electrician who was waiting while his daughter dropped off Amazon returns at the post office. He was leaning toward the AfD. “Something has to happen,” he said. “It can’t go on like this.” In what sense? “Germany must stay German,” he said. “Not so many foreigners. There are simply too many of them. You see German retirees searching the trash cans for empty bottles, and yet these others come into the country and get everything. That doesn’t seem right to me.”
Twenty-five kilometres away, in Meiningen, I met a retired child-care worker named Isa Zienert. She was in the town square with her granddaughter, who was eating ice cream. Zienert said that she had no problem with migration from Africa, but she was bothered by the Ukrainian refugees, who were receiving major cash support with few questions asked. “They’re doing well,” she said, while Germans seeking assistance “still have to fill out all the forms. We as Germans, we are forgotten.” But she wasn’t voting for the AfD. She used to vote for the Social Democrats, and now she was inclined toward Wagenknecht’s new party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). “There’s truth in what she says,” she told me.
A day later, I arrived in Erfurt for Wagenknecht’s rally there. En route, I met an elderly woman named Heidrun Atlung, who had worked at a typewriter-maker until it closed, along with so many other eastern employers, after reunification. Then she became a cleaner. She had long supported Die Linke, which had grown out of the East German Communist Party. Wagenknecht had broken off from Die Linke last October, casting it as captured by woke activism, and now Atlung, who felt that Wagenknecht was “more for the worker,” was going with her. Atlung liked her talk about pensions, because it was unfair that retirees in the east got less. She liked her call for an end to the war. What if that allowed Vladimir Putin to hold the territory he’d already gained? “Das ist mir eigentlich egal,” she said. (“I don’t really care.”) As for the migrants, she said, “They have to behave themselves.” With such positions, I asked, why not the AfD? “I would never vote for them,” she said. “One can’t do that.” Wagenknecht’s appeal, put plainly: hard-edged populism, without the stigma.
I found the rally at the square near the town’s main cathedral. A good thousand people were gathered there. Large signs on trucks captured two of Wagenknecht’s main platforms: neutrality and anti-wokeism. “Diplomatie statt Kriegstreiberei” (“Diplomacy Instead of Warmongering”), read one. “Rechnen statt Gendern” (“Arithmetic Instead of Genders”), read the other.
After preliminary speeches by local candidates, Wagenknecht emerged. She is tall and poised, fifty-five years old, with an upright, placid bearing that, together with her elegant dresses, classic jewelry, and a hair style that one newspaper referred to as a “Rosa Luxemburg,” evokes an earlier era—late-Romanov nobility, perhaps. Wagenknecht, the daughter of an Iranian father and German mother, grew up in East Germany, joined the Communist Party at nineteen, shortly before the regime’s collapse, and got a Ph.D. in economics. She now lives in the state of Saarland, in the west, with her husband, the eighty-year-old former Social Democratic leader Oskar Lafontaine.
I knew her reputation as an assured and imperturbable communicator, honed through years of sparring on TV talk shows; someone who named an entire party after herself was obviously not lacking in self-confidence. But I was still struck by the command with which she moved through forty-five minutes of carefully barbed populist oratory. Whereas Höcke speaks in the swelling tones that many Germans find disconcertingly familiar, Wagenknecht stays in a more controlled register as she presses her case. The élites, she said, believe that “it’s a betrayal of democracy when people vote wrong. I must say then, No. It’s a betrayal of democracy when the government in Berlin ignores the wishes of the people for years.”
One by one, she ticked through the now unpopular figures of the national government, painting them as out-of-touch cosmopolitans who had no idea what the German people really needed or how they really lived. She reserved special scorn for Robert Habeck, an ambitious leader in the Greens party, whose proposal to almost completely ban the installation of new gas and oil heating systems provoked one of the government’s biggest setbacks after mounting opposition to the cost scuttled the plan. “Herr Habeck is of the opinion that most people live like his friends in their hip big-city bubble in Berlin, where life perhaps really consists of choosing between oat-milk macchiatos, cargo bikes, and organic shops,” she said. “A politician should know that the vast majority of people in the country don’t get up in the morning and think, Am I going to be a virtuous person today and go to the organic grocery, or am I going to Aldi?”
She mocked the government for spurning the cheap gas that used to come via pipeline from Russia, while accepting much more expensive Russian gas that arrives by circuitous routes on L.N.G. tankers, or the American gas produced by fracking. She skewered another Green leader, who, in an interview, had greatly overestimated the size of the average German pension. She lamented schools at which handwriting was no longer taught properly. She knocked the federal minister of health, who had, she said, pushed for excessive COVID-mitigation measures but now presided over small-town hospital closures.
She referred to the Solingen attack directly. “People keep getting murdered by people who actually are no longer allowed to be in the country,” she said. “When people have to fear moving around safely . . .” And then came the wars. On the Middle East, she decried Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel but also the “brutal war against the people of Gaza.” On Ukraine, she called Putin a lawbreaker, but ridiculed the notion advanced by the governing parties and Germany’s allies that one couldn’t negotiate with him because he had started the war. “Did the government break off talks with the U.S. when it started its wars?” she said. The crowd gave perhaps its loudest cheer.
Not once had she invoked the AfD by name, but the competition was clear. I thought about something that Luhn, the AfD candidate, had said when I asked about her. She had an “iridescent persona,” he said, significant financial backing—German newspapers had reported that the BSW received about five million euros from a single contributor—and had managed to get thousands of street signs up on lampposts before he had. “She is a Trojan horse, installed by the old parties to take voters away from us,” he said. (After the speech ended, a middle-aged man rushed the stage and splashed Wagenknecht with a red liquid. Guards hauled him away, and she left unhurt.)
I turned to a couple nearby who were enraptured by the speech. “I’m so glad there’s now another alternative,” Roland Jakob, a retired forester who had previously voted Die Linke, said. He thanked me for covering the rally, saying that the German media were biased toward the established parties. “We lived in the D.D.R., and we knew what it was like to constantly have to read between the lines,” he said. “That really bugs us.” Then he said again, smiling, “Thank goodness I don’t have to vote for the AfD.”
On Election Night, the final tally for the BSW came in at nearly sixteen per cent in Thuringia, well above the combined total for all three traffic-light parties, and at almost twelve per cent in Saxony, enough for third place there, too. Exit polls showed that it had pulled mostly from Die Linke, but had also drawn in first-time voters and some former AfD ones.
At a party in Erfurt, overlooking the cathedral, Wagenknecht emphasized that she would not go into coalition with the AfD, which left open the question of how, exactly, a government would be formed in the two states. As hard as it was to imagine, the likeliest path was a coalition between the BSW and the Christian Democrats. They disagreed on the war, but there was already a big shift happening on the other major issue, migration, with leaders of the established parties all calling for more stringent rules.
Wagenknecht went from one TV interview to another, invoking the “huge gap in representation” and “people who are left hanging.” I thought of a striking graphic I had seen a few days earlier in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which showed that voters in the former East Germany reported similar rates of personal well-being as those in the former West Germany, but much lower rates of satisfaction with how their region was doing. This might be hard for a visitor to believe, given how polished eastern towns now look after billions of euros in post-reunification investment. But the population has fallen far in much of the region—it’s down almost a fifth since reunification in Thuringia—and incomes remain well below those in the west. It’s all relative.
What seemed clear was that it no longer made much sense to describe German politics in left-right terms. Klaus Dörre, a sociologist at the University of Jena, told me that the real divide was now “green-blue”: a cultural and regional divide between big-city professionals and workers elsewhere. “Trust in the élites has gone to the devil,” he said. This distrust extended to young people, among whom the AfD did especially well, which Dörre attributed partly to lingering alienation over COVID restrictions.
Wagenknecht herself argued against the left-right dichotomy, in response to questions that I sent her, by taking aim at the parties she was seeking to supplant. “The traditional left-wing parties are no longer ‘left’ in the sense that they are focussed on social justice and the needs of people for whom things are not going so well or who live in regions that are grappling with deindustrialization, depopulation, and crumbling infrastructure,” she said. (It has been Wagenknecht’s luxury as a renegade outsider that she hasn’t actually had to address these problems in government, though her party does propose solutions, among them lifting a national “debt brake” that has limited investment, one of the planks that sets the BSW apart from the AfD.) She also rejected attempts to frame her party as “extreme left,” opposite the AfD’s “extreme right.” “We stand for social justice and détente. We defend free speech and seek sensible economic policy for the middle class,” she said. “What is extreme about that?”
For nearly three decades, eastern Germany has been the region that needed to catch up, economically. Now, in its increasing turn away from the established parties, it looked more like a front-runner. One night, in the western city of Würzburg, I met a Cologne-based engineer travelling for work, whose fiancée hails from Saxony. He was adamant: the elections were a sign of things to come. “It’s not a surprise,” he said. “It will happen in western Germany, too.” ♦
