The article was originally published on Marlene Laruelle’s Substack, Vivatopia.
Germany was supposed to be the country where history made the far right impossible, or at least kept it permanently at the margins. Recent elections in Saxony-Anhalt suggest something more unsettling. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has not moderated, but voting for it is becoming normalized. A government led by it is becoming imaginable, and the historical taboos that once helped contain the radical right are losing some of their political force. What kind of party, and what kind of political future, is taking shape through that victory?
When Voting AfD Stops Being Exceptional
The sociology of the vote is striking. The AfD took around 61 percent among blue-collar workers and roughly half of voters aged 35 to 59. Men still supported it more strongly than women, but the party can no longer be described as a niche for angry young males. Most revealingly, it brought around 170,000 former abstainers to the polls and took another 83,000 voters from the CDU.
The map tells a similar story. The AfD came first in all 218 of Saxony-Anhalt’s municipalities. But its support was strongest outside the cities: around 51 percent in municipalities of fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, against roughly 32 percent in Halle, Magdeburg, and Dessau-Roßlau. The surge in turnout was also disproportionately rural.
The obvious explanation is economic decline, but the evidence is less straightforward than we imagine. A recent longitudinal study using German Socio-Economic Panel data finds that concern about immigration explains far more of the variation in AfD support than socioeconomic deprivation. Another recent study of eastern Germany reaches a related conclusion: political alienation and cultural resentment matter more than economic grievance alone.
Declining towns and regions matter because they create an environment in which migration, status, political voice, and cultural change come to feel like different expressions of the same abandonment.
The AfD has a heavily working-class electorate, but that does not mean its voters are primarily voting on economic grounds. Declining towns and regions matter because they create an environment in which migration, status, political voice, and cultural change come to feel like different expressions of the same abandonment. So former Eastern Germany has a “more fertile ground,” but the “same seeds” can be found in former Western Germany too, the authors argue.
As Adam Tooze explains, voting AfD is “above all a vote for someone who, like you, rejects the status quo, who demands that radical action be taken and is not afraid to break eggs to make omelettes” and whose socio-economic vision can be defined as “nativist producerist deservism:” prioritizing natives, valorizing productive workers and small businesses against elites and dependents, and restricting solidarity to those deemed deserving.
Something else is changing as well. For years, the AfD was understood largely as a vehicle for punishment: voters chose it because they were angry at the ruling elites. That explanation is becoming less convincing. In Saxony-Anhalt, around 35 percent of voters now saw the AfD as the party best able to solve the state’s main problems, compared with only 9 percent in 2021. They now believe it could actually govern, which makes the story quite different.
This is also why the Brandmauer, the firewall against cooperation with the AfD, is producing an increasingly strange political effect. The other parties may still succeed in keeping the party out of the state government, but it means that by default the AfD shapes almost every possible coalition simply through its exclusion. Politics begins to look less like competition among several parties and more like a division between the AfD and everyone else. The party would, in that sense, govern parts of the political system without governing the state. This may be the deeper meaning of normalization.
When Power Becomes Thinkable
The most interesting evolution may consequently be taking place inside the AfD itself. Different figures are beginning to address the problems that arise once a party built around opposition starts imagining itself in power.
Maximilian Krah is useful less as a “new leader” than as a conceptual translator. The AfD’s official economic position remains markedly market-liberal and fiscally conservative, much closer to the FDP and CDU than its increasingly working-class electorate might suggest. Krah and intellectuals around the New Right have been trying to develop a vocabulary capable of bridging that gap: criticism of libertarianism and global oligarchic capitalism, a socially embedded conception of property, protection of locally rooted firms, and what they call solidarischer Patriotismus.
The important move here is the attempt to redefine solidarity itself. Rather than universalizing redistribution, they seek to nationalize social protection: welfare, economic security and social obligation are retained, but bounded by membership in the national community. Whether this becomes AfD doctrine is another question. For the moment, the mismatch between the party’s electorate, its official economics and this emerging intellectual project may be more revealing than any supposed convergence.
Ulrich Siegmund, nicknamed “Mr. Smile,” addresses a different problem: how to make power imaginable. His innovation is primarily affective. The older radical-right repertoire depended heavily on feelings of decline and civilizational emergency. Siegmund adds optimism, regional nostalgia, festivals, motorbike rallies, and an almost ostentatiously ordinary persona. The ideological content does not necessarily moderate, but the emotional staging changes and becomes more optimistic. Government is no longer represented as the rupture that follows catastrophe, but as something familiar and local.
Even his more confrontational statements belong to this expectation of power. Siegmund has spoken of replacing 150 to 200 officials after taking office, although German civil-service protections would make such a sweeping turnover extremely difficult. But the statement matters because of what it presupposes: the AfD is already thinking about the practical problem of making an administration obey a new political leadership.
Jean-Pascal Hohm represents a third development: the institutionalization of that ambition. As head of the new Generation Deutschland youth organization, Hohm has argued explicitly that simply being dagegen—against everything—is no longer enough. A party that expects to govern must say what it wants positively and acquire the capacity for compromise. Yet this is strategic rather than ideological moderation, because Hohm has simultaneously called for “remigration” on a massive scale and insisted that Germany remain “the country of Germans.”
Unlike the old Junge Alternative, Generation Deutschland is integrated much more tightly into the mother party. Alice Weidel has called it a Kaderschmiede: a training ground for the second and third ranks the AfD will need if electoral expansion is ever to become durable political rule. The older model allowed a semi-autonomous youth milieu to radicalize the party from outside. The new one seeks to discipline and socialize ideological activists as future officeholders.
Taken together, these are three responses to the same question: how does an anti-system party become a governing class without ceasing to define itself against the establishment? Krah works on a positive ideological vocabulary on economic issues; Siegmund makes the possession of power look normal and even cosy; Hohm works on the personnel and institutional habits required to exercise it.
Its strategic adaptation lies in learning that radical goals do not always require an insurgent political style but can work through social embeddedness and an emerging governing imagination.
What is emerging, in other words, is not ideological moderation but division of political labor around the prospect of rule. The AfD needs to work on its doctrine, on its affective normalization and on its cadre institutionalization. Its strategic adaptation lies in learning that radical goals do not always require an insurgent political style but can work through social embeddedness and an emerging governing imagination.
When History Stops Being a Firewall
There is another German paradox in this election. Few countries have invested as much as Germany in remembering the catastrophe of the twentieth century. Schools, memorials, museums, and public rituals have all been built around the conviction that remembering the past is part of protecting democracy in the present. And yet a radical-right party containing currents that openly challenge this culture of remembrance can now win 44 percent of the vote in a German state.
One conclusion would be that memory has failed. But perhaps the problem is formulated incorrectly, because it was naïve to think historical memory was a vaccine. More importantly, the analogy with the 1930s simply may not be the dominant way in which most AfD voters understand what they are doing.
There are obviously neo-Nazi milieus and genuine nostalgia for parts of the Nazi past around the radical right.
But millions of AfD voters do not experience their vote as a return to the Nazi past and understand it instead through the language of renewal: recovering control, replacing an exhausted elite, restoring belonging, and imagining that things could work differently.
Millions of AfD voters do not experience their vote as a return to the Nazi past and understand it instead through the language of renewal: recovering control, replacing an exhausted elite, restoring belonging, and imagining that things could work differently.
This is also why the familiar distinction between a protest vote and a vote of genuine support has become less useful. The AfD vote can be both at once: it is a vote to throw people out and a vote to put others in; a desire to clear the political landscape and an expectation that something better might follow. Rejection and hope are no longer opposites.
Nostalgia works in a similarly complicated way. The AfD does not offer one coherent historical past. There is Ostalgie: mopeds, regional familiarity, memories of social stability, and an eastern identity experienced as devalued after reunification. Alongside it sits a much older national nostalgia—for Bismarck, the Kaiserreich, military history, national achievement, and a Germany imagined before the burden of twentieth-century guilt. At the radical edge, this can shade into the relativization of National Socialism itself. These pasts are historically incompatible, but politically they do not need to be coherent. What unites them is the promise of recovering something that was supposedly taken away, the right to feel positively about belonging.
This makes the AfD slogan “more Bismarck, less Hitler” particularly revealing. Taken literally, it is a proposal to shift the emphasis of history teaching away from National Socialism and toward the German Empire—a real objective of the Saxony-Anhalt AfD. But figuratively, it says something larger: we want a past from which a positive future can be told.
Once again, liberalism’s weakness may lie in its difficulty speaking positively about belonging and rootedness, leaving the language of pride to the radical right.
That does not make the historical revisionism harmless, but it helps explain why such language can travel beyond the small minority actually nostalgic for National Socialism. The political appeal may lie less in rehabilitating Hitler than in demanding a usable past, a history from which pride, agency, and a future can once again be extracted. Once again, liberalism’s weakness may lie in its difficulty speaking positively about belonging and rootedness, leaving the language of pride to the radical right.
Marlene Laruelle is Full Professor at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome and the director of the Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University.
Image made by John Chrobak using “(2026) AfD Ulrich Siegmund 160704907” by Roy Zuo, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; “BismarckBremen” by Jürgen Howaldt, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0; Map from OpenStreetMap, licensed under ODbL by the OSMF.
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