In politics, sometimes a long-predicted outcome can still generate a sense of shock. For months, opinion polls have indicated that the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, and the populist Bundnis Sarah Wagenknecht party, or BSW, enjoy substantial support in eastern Germany. Nevertheless, the success of both parties in regional elections on Sept. 1 in Saxony and Thuringia have fueled further infighting among the parties of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unstable coalition government, as well as uncertainty over how Friedrich Merz’s leadership will help the conservative Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, regain power at the national level.
As a result, German politics is likely to become even more fractious and paralyzed, at the very moment when decisive action from Berlin is needed to help tackle dangerous crises facing the European Union.
The AfD’s showing—a close second in Saxony with 30.6 percent of the vote and first place in Thuringia with 32.8 percent—makes it a dominant player on the regional level in at least two German states. Yet, even as observers and policymakers expressed consternation over the results, the CDU leadership still tried to claim that holding on to first place in Saxony with 31.7 percent and second place in Thuringia with 23.6 percent has validated Merz’s political project for the party’s return from opposition.
Meanwhile, for Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, or SPD, the Greens and the pro-market Free Democratic Party, or FDP, the outcomes are likely to make the fragile governing coalition on the national level even more dysfunctional. The SPD finished with a pitiful 7 percent in Saxony and 6 percent in Thuringia, while the Greens suffered significant losses in Saxony and failed to win any seats in Thuringia, and the FDP totally collapsed in both states. As a result, already vicious policy disputes among them are likely to escalate as Scholz and the leaders of the Greens and FDP fight to save their parties from disaster.
Finally, by failing to gain any seats in Saxony and losing two-thirds of its voters in Thuringia, the Linke—or Left—party suffered the worst fiasco of all. Now relegated to a political husk even in eastern regions that had once been the party’s core bastions, many of the Linke’s most prominent leaders chose to join Sahra Wagenknecht, who had until recently been the party’s most effective communicator, in her breakaway BSW movement rather than soldiering on. Promoting a blend of anti-capitalism with deep cultural conservatism and support for the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the BSW’s success in attracting disgruntled Linke voters in Saxony and Thuringia has destroyed any prospects of a far-left party that could reconcile the former East Germany’s traditions with the geopolitical and constitutional foundations of post-reunification Germany.
While the rise of the recently launched BSW has been a sudden shock, the AfD’s ability to mount a challenge for power in Saxony, Thuringia and other states in eastern Germany—whose regional governments have substantial powers when it comes to education, policing and infrastructure policy in Germany’s federal system—was already visible by the late 2010s. Yet with the BSW now winning over voters still loyal to a romanticized memory of the former East Germany and its Cold War-era allies, it has become very difficult for parties committed to Germany’s constitutional order to build stable coalitions that can prevent the AfD from taking power in eastern regions. With the CDU in western Germany and its Bavarian partners in the Christian Social Union focused on attacks against the Green party’s supposedly “woke” agenda, and much of the CDU/CSU membership viscerally hostile to the socialist outlook of the Linke, any effort to build state-level governing coalitions that bypass the BSW and AfD will prove difficult to manage. Yet any attempt by the CDU in Saxony and Thuringia to cut deals with the AfD and BSW in the face of the visceral hostility felt toward both parties among CDU/CSU members in the rest of the country could split the German center-right, just when it seems on track to win national elections in September 2025.
The populist tone that Germany’s mainstream parties now strike when it comes to policy issues like migration is more likely to exacerbate their internal tensions than strengthen their hand in the battle against the AfD.
Faced with such intractable electoral dilemmas, the FDP, SPD and CDU/CSU are now engaged in desperate posturing over key policy issues in a bid to retain the support of exasperated voters. But the populist tone that their leaders now strike when it comes to such fraught policy issues as migration and support for Ukraine is more likely to exacerbate tensions within these parties—given the huge differences in each party’s relative strength and political culture in Germany’s north, south, east and west—than strengthen their hand in the battle against the AfD.
The political risks of trying to outbid far-right populists when it comes to migration were starkly visible in the aftermath of the horrific knife attack by a Syrian asylum-seeker that killed several people in the northwestern town of Solingen on Aug. 23. With the AfD seizing on the perpetrator’s background to promote an anti-migrant agenda, CDU/CSU leaders opportunistically piled on, pressuring the SPD and Greens over purported linkages between migration and insecurity. Within two weeks of the attack, and only days after the election results in Saxony and Thuringia, FDP figures joined in, using strident rhetoric over migration to attack the Greens. They have now found themselves backpedaling away from demands related to deportations and border security that cannot be implemented without the consent and support of 26 other fellow EU states.
More broadly, the anti-migration posturing could generate voter expectations of drastic state action that are not only constitutionally impossible for democratic parties to fulfil, but also economically self-destructive. At a time when German businesses and public institutions face severe shortages of skilled workers, any attempt to severely restrict migration is likely to founder on the rocks of economic reality. This extends to Saxony and Thuringia, where health care services and small businesses struggle to find enough workers. As a result, even if the AfD does cobble together a governing coalition in its regional bastions, it will end up facing a choice between ideological purity and the need to import labor from other countries to secure economic growth and functioning public services. In the face of such visible demographic and economic pressures, a CDU—whose iconic first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, initiated the guest worker system in the 1950s that inadvertently opened West Germany to mass migration in the first place—does not look credible to most voters when it embraces populist rhetoric on migration issues.
Though the tragedy in Solingen did reflect dysfunctions when it comes to policing of asylum-seekers, the promises from panicked center-right and center-left leaders that tougher security measures could quickly resolve such problems echoed previous moments when responses to terror attacks became intertwined with electoral anxieties. From the crackdown after the murder of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics to the response to brutal violence committed by supporters of the Kurdish nationalist PKK in the early 1990s, German governments and opposition parties have cyclically backed extensive deportations of migrants and asylum-seekers, only to find themselves facing the same security problems after such measures lost momentum. The unrealistic expectations of a rapid reduction of asylum-seekers stoked by CDU/CSU posturing and the panicked response of Scholz and the SPD are therefore only likely to play into the hands of far-right groups willing to outbid rivals by ignoring the rule of law when in power and downplaying economic pressures when in opposition.
If desperation to counter AfD attacks over migration is pushing mainstream parties into a mess of policy contradictions, attempts to seek coalition deals with the BSW could fracture them, given their commitment to Germany’s Western allies as well as to helping Ukraine survive the Russian invasion. Even if regional governments have no direct influence over Berlin’s geopolitical strategy, a CDU-led coalition in Saxony or Thuringia that includes the BSW would constantly face pressure over Sahra Wagenknecht’s demands to abandon Kyiv and embrace partnership with Moscow. The open hostility that Wagenknecht displays toward NATO and the EU will also inevitably fuel controversy within the CDU, SPD, Linke and Green parties over whether to break off cooperation with the BSW.
In a fraught environment in which every major decision over aid to Kyiv, NATO partnership with the U.S. and deeper EU integration with Brussels could trigger the collapse of regional coalition governments, cooperation with the BSW to exclude the far-right could backfire, fostering party splits and political instability that play into the hands of the AfD instead. However unwieldy multiparty coalitions involving the SPD, Linke and Greens might be for the CDU, a partnership with parties that more or less share a consensus over the basic foundations of Germany’s constitutional order and geopolitical position could in the long term prove more sustainable than a Faustian bargain with a populist movement driven by a leadership cult around Sahra Wagenknecht and the desire for close ties to Moscow.
Many observers have deemed the election results in Thuringia and Saxony to be a wakeup call that requires parties loyal to Germany’s constitutional order to take swift and decisive action. Yet what might seem like tactically clever gambits to counter the rise of authoritarian populists can lead to strategically disastrous consequences. If Merz and Scholz don’t think before they act, they will simply charge into every trap set by dangerous opportunists who don’t play by their rules.
Alexander Clarkson is a lecturer in European studies at King’s College London. His research explores the impact that transnational diaspora communities have had on the politics of Germany and Europe after 1945 as well as how the militarization of the European Union’s border system has affected its relationships with neighboring states. His weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.