Germany’s far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland, and its 44% win in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt is a symptom of a systemic crisis of democracy that the political mainstream keeps mistaking for a local disturbance. Part I of this two-part essay examines the misdiagnoses and the three defective strategies built on them: isolating the far right, copying it, and letting it govern.
On September 6, 2026, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party won 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt’s state election. While this state in the former East Germany has just over two million people, the result matters well beyond the region. Germany is Europe’s largest economy. Its postwar democracy was designed with elaborate safeguards against a return of authoritarianism, so what happens there shapes the prospects of democracy across the continent and around the world. Commentators responded to the election results by searching for a single, clearly identifiable cause that the political center could then fix—immigration, a sluggish bureaucracy, or the peculiar political culture of the former East Germany.
Single-variable explanations, however, lead to single-factor strategies, which are bound to fail. The rise of the far right is a symptom of a systemic crisis of democracy, more visible in eastern Germany than elsewhere.
Blaming Institutions, Culture, and Character
One unconvincing cluster of explanations focuses on a country’s particular institutions. In the German case, conservative commentators often lament a slow and frustrating bureaucracy, which is indeed notoriously sluggish. The morning after the Saxony-Anhalt election, one of Germany’s largest news portals blamed the “sprawling bureaucratic state” for growing political dissatisfaction and prescribed trimming it as the remedy.
Such explanations share a common flaw: they look for country-specific factors, even though the phenomenon in question is general. In affected countries around the world, some local institutional peculiarity takes the blame for the far right’s breakthrough, whether that means the US Electoral College, Britain’s first-past-the-post system, or France’s two-round presidential election.
If the causes were such unique institutional quirks, the far right’s global presence would be hard to explain. By 2025, radical-right parties together formed Europe’s most popular party family, with support above the levels reached in the 1930s. In summer’s polls from 2026, France’s Rassemblement National stood at around 35%, Norway’s Progress Party at 30%, and Britain’s Reform UK at 26%. Narendra Modi has governed India since 2014, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has governed Türkiye since 2003; the former in a federal parliamentary system, the latter in a system he converted from parliamentary to presidential along the way. Neither institutional design has stood in their way.
Simplistic cultural readings, the various decodings of the national psyche, are not much more convincing. In Germany, East-West identity carries distinct social, political, and cultural traits. East Germans (“Ossis”) supposedly inherited an inferior, illiberal political culture, and enforcing this theoretical condemnation is known as “Ossi-bashing.” The theory has several Eastern European variants, all of which explain the rise of illiberalism by a supposedly servile national character: the homo sovieticus, the serf mentality, or civilizational incompetence. However, the recent fall of illiberal governments in Poland and Hungary has turned these same countries into international laboratories of democratic resistance. So much for the dysfunctional national psyche. East German particularities may explain the intensity of the mechanism, but they cannot explain the mechanism itself.
The cultural explanation also has a more scientific-looking version, which by now is the most thoroughly refuted theory of populism yet still organizes public debate: the cultural backlash of aging, uneducated men against unstoppable progress toward cosmopolitanism. But basic facts contradict this theory. The AfD was founded in 2013 by highly educated free-market economists led by Bernd Lucke. Bernd Baumann, the parliamentary group’s chief whip, has a portrait of Friedrich Hayek on the wall in his office. The party is popular among the young; in Saxony-Anhalt, 41% of first-time voters aged 18 to 24 voted for it. It also won 59% of workers, yet the best predictor of its strongest districts is the density of craft and small industrial businesses. The party’s financiers are frustrated big entrepreneurs. In the 2025 campaign, the AfD received the largest individual donations of any party, including €1.5 million from Winfried Stöcker, founder of the diagnostics company Euroimmun. The party’s largest known donor is Henning Conle, a real-estate billionaire who lives in Zurich and London and owns a holding company in Liechtenstein.
The AfD, like much of today’s far right, began as a market-radical elite project that was later recast in exclusionary-nationalist terms. Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, the Republican Party under Donald Trump, and Reform UK have traveled similar paths. These parties unite two discontented constituencies: domestic business owners who feel sidelined by global competition and a middle class that feels devalued. A large share of workers vote for the far right parties as the only available alternative to the governing elites, even though that alternative rarely delivers for them.
Behind all these explanations lies a common narrative: the far right is a passing disturbance in an otherwise functioning system. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, for instance, contritely “admitted” that the government does not communicate its measures well enough. If only someone could finally explain to those foolish voters how well the government is actually doing. In reality, the AfD has been growing for 13 years while trust in the political elite keeps falling. Only 17% of Germans now believe the state can carry out its basic tasks. Across Western democracies, the share of people who think democracy is not important is rising. A disturbance that lasts this long and spreads this widely is a chronic, life-threatening illness of democracy.
Three Defenses That Do Not Work
Misdiagnoses lead to dead-end strategies. Those who view the AfD as the expression of a minoritarian subculture expect a “firewall” to stop it. Those who attribute its success to its specific policies choose to copy them. Those who see a passing disturbance call for letting it govern, hoping it fails and is exposed. All three expectations are illusory.
The firewall, the commitment of all other German parties to refuse any cooperation with the AfD, strengthens what it is meant to wall off through three mechanisms. First, it splits the political space in two: five legitimate, democratic parties on one side, the AfD on the other. Second, the only common denominator among the five is defending the status quo, so the theme of change belongs to the far right. In Germany, this is a long-standing condition. As early as 1980, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt told anyone with visions to see a doctor; this has remained the philosophy of the German center ever since, a world of small technical steps and muddling through. Third, firewall coalitions are paralyzed from birth given the ideological distance between parties like the socialist Die Linke and the conservative Christian Democrats; decisive governance is impossible. Against this dithering, the plain-spoken drive of the far right impresses more and more people.
Co-opting the far right’s themes is another dead end. In January 2025, Friedrich Merz relied on AfD votes to pass a migration resolution in the Bundestag; at the federal election four weeks later, the AfD doubled its 2021 score. The Danish Social Democrats pioneered the anti-immigration center-left in 2019 by adopting the far right’s migration program, yet in spring 2026 they collapsed to their worst result since 1903. The research shows the same thing: on the terrain of exclusionary nationalism, the far right is unbeatable because voters prefer the original to the copy.
Centrist parties increasingly resign themselves to the third option: let them govern. The idea that right-wing populism succeeds in opposition and fails in government dates from the Austrian Freedom Party’s (FPÖ) entry into government in 2000, after which it fell from 27% to 10% in 2002. By 2024, it was stronger than ever, finishing first with 29%. As to letting them govern and watching them fail, I have 16 years of “demystifying the far right in power” with Orbán to offer as a test; I do not recommend trying it.
The misdiagnosis stems from how knowledge about populism and democracy is produced. Populism research applies ever-finer methods to ever-smaller variables, while the logic of clicks pushes the media toward personal dramas and moral panics. Policy institutes operating between the two tend to stay close to those in power and rarely confront them with unwelcome findings. The systemic crisis is thus broken down into its components, even though the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
All three strategies share one assumption: that the AfD is the problem to be managed. Thirteen years of growth under each strategy point to a deeper source, the exhaustion of the postwar settlement that reconciled market economies with democratic equality. In Part II of this essay, I’ll turn to that crisis and to what a democratic answer would require.
Gábor Scheiring, a 2025 CFK Global Fellow, is an assistant professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, where he researches democratic backsliding, economic inequality, and post-socialist transformations. He is a coauthor with Benedek Jávor of the forthcoming Stanford University Press book How Democracies Revive: Why Illiberalism Keeps Winning and What to Do About It and author of The Retreat of Liberal Democracy. Scheiring is also a former member of Parliament in Hungary.
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