Saxony-Anhalt: When the AfD Nears 40%, the Real Prize Is the State Apparatus

This Sunday, 1.7 million voters in Saxony-Anhalt, a former East German state, could hand the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) its most significant result since the party's founding in 2013: polls put it at 40% of the vote. A dizzying figure in the country that invented "never again" — and one that, according to the party's own website, would open the door to "anything is possible": including, in theory, the first regional government led by the far right since the end of the Second World War.

The institutional guardrails exist, and they're worth restating: in Germany, the winner of a regional election doesn't automatically govern. The state parliament elects the minister-president after a coalition is formed. In Thuringia two years ago, the AfD came in first — a first for the far right since 1945 — and was nonetheless blocked by the unanimous refusal of the other parties. The most likely scenario in Saxony-Anhalt remains a coalition of minority parties that together clear 50%.

But this is precisely where the reassuring reflex becomes dangerous. Stephan Kramer, head of Thuringia's domestic intelligence agency and former secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, puts his finger on what matters most: the risk isn't symbolic, it's administrative. A German state means "the interior ministry, the police, the regional intelligence service, education, appointments and the handling of sensitive information." For the first time, he says, the party could use "the machinery of a regional government" to exert influence at the federal level. For Jewish communities, that translates into very concrete terms: who protects the synagogues, who classifies the threats, who writes the history curriculum.

Charlotte Knobloch, 93, a Holocaust survivor hidden by a Christian German family, told Stern magazine what everyone would rather not hear: "Even the Nazi party started small and tested what was possible." AfD politicians, she adds, are "testing the limits of what is acceptable." That is not a rhetorical comparison: it is a description of a method, delivered by someone who lived through it.

And here is the angle the mainstream press isn't highlighting: the calendar. After Saxony-Anhalt comes Lower Saxony on September 13, then Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin on the 20th. Three elections in fifteen days, in a country where the AfD already leads national polls. Sunday's vote isn't a regional election: it's the first domino in a sequence that could normalize the far right as a governing force. Germany's firewall has held so far because it has never been tested three times in two weeks. Banning the party, as Knobloch demands, remains legally perilous — postwar Germany has outlawed only two parties, in 1952 and 1956. But when nearly a quarter of European voters now back the far right, compared with 5% in 1995, the question is no longer whether the dams will hold. It's how many Sundays they have left.