Saxony-Anhalt was once part of the heartland of East Germany. Today it is a German flyover state, with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the Federal Republic. Yet, like our own Mississippi, Saxony-Anhalt has many historical treasures for visitors who explore its small towns and villages. Martin Luther’s church in Wittenberg is in Saxony-Anhalt; the architect Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus Museum is in the small city of Dessau. As the Hitler regime collapsed in 1945, American GIs conquered the state, sweeping to its capital of Magdeburg before pulling back and handing the region over to the Russians. Four decades of communism followed.
Like many Europeans living in rural and small-town regions, Germans in Saxony-Anhalt display authentic conservative instincts. They believe, with good reason, that elites in Berlin and Brussels are out of touch with their cultural values. While their complicated past is checkered by communism and Nazism, Saxony-Anhalters believe they retain a basic right to be proud of their homeland. Of all Germany’s political parties, only the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has connected with those deeply held values. That is a principal reason why the AfD took a landslide 44 percent of the vote in Sunday’s state election.
The AfD’s victory has led to another round of panic for the German ruling class. Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his Christian Democrats (CDU), once Germany’s dominant right-wing political force, are now face-to-face with the reality that they have failed for years to represent authentic conservative values, leaving the field wide open for the AfD to rise and prosper. Although he had an opportunity to take Germany in a new direction, Merz was unwilling to break with the disastrous policies of former Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Berlin elite. Today, he appears to be a political failure. Merz famously boasted that he would cut the AfD’s vote tallies in half. They have doubled since he took office in 2025.
Merz began his chancellorship by ignoring the AfD’s appeal and forming a coalition government with the left-wing Social Democrats (SPD). Unsurprisingly, Merz’s “conservative-socialist” coalition has produced dysfunctional national leadership. Merz has failed to set Germany on a new path on key issues such as energy production, nuclear power, climate policy, taxes and regulation, and, most importantly, immigration. For years, the SPD and Greens, with the CDU’s slow-walk collaboration, have shaped Berlin’s approach to these issues from a left-wing (and often far-left) perspective.
German families and small businesses are inundated with rules governing how they heat their homes, drive their vehicles, and conduct countless other daily activities. Many of these nanny-state regulations come straight from the planning rooms of SPD and Green politicians who privately think Karl Marx got it right. The long-standing German propensity to accept high taxes and tedious regulation may finally have been exhausted. Certainly that seems to be the case in Saxony-Anhalt.
But instead of setting a new course for Germany, Berlin’s ruling classes have doubled down on their narrative that the AfD’s incredible growth is an extremist phenomenon with sinister roots in Germany’s authoritarian past. The true explanation for the AfD’s rise is much simpler: Germany stopped having an authentically conservative party as its elites—just as they did in the United States and across Europe—pushed the political framework further to the left. The German left skillfully marched through the institutions and captured them, seizing the initiative on hot-button issues such as climate change, culture, economic growth, and, above all, borders and immigration. The CDU establishment has emerged as a political casualty of this left-wing onslaught, as an increasing number of its voters switch to the AfD (and many of those who remain consider forging a new majority coalition with this hard-right party).
The top three campaign issues in Saxony-Anhalt were immigration, the economy, and education. Even though immigrants constitute less than four percent of the state’s population, Saxony-Anhalters share the broader national concern that open borders have pushed Germany toward unwanted American-style multiculturalism. They see the country’s broken asylum system as the vehicle for this transformation, with overly generous welfare programs incentivizing illegal migrants to come. Like many American conservatives, they fume when foreigners who are ordered to leave refuse to do so, a disconcertingly common occurrence.
Merz and his supporters assert that, while Ukrainian war refugees belong in a special category, the Berlin governing coalition has reduced overall foreign arrivals in Germany. Too little, too late, AfD politicians have answered. They argue that the CDU is only tweaking a fundamentally broken system imposed on the country by German and European Union elites, who cleverly use open-border interpretations of international and German national law. The AfD maintains that the law can be differently interpreted, and that argument has resonated widely in Saxony-Anhalt.
In Germany, education is a state responsibility. In Saxony-Anhalt, it became an AfD issue largely because state schools have imported extreme woke and gender-identity policies. Yes, the left’s long march through the world’s educational institutions even reached the state school system in Saxony-Anhalt, where parents—much like many of their rural American counterparts—are dismayed by the values being taught to their children. The once-mighty German educational model that produced the Gymnasium-educated, university-track graduate is long gone. As part of its opposition to wokeism, the AfD campaigned for the right of Saxony-Anhalters to homeschool their children.
The AfD’s latent anti-Americanism must be understood as pushback against the same far-left causes our own conservatives are battling. For many in Germany and around the world, American values no longer mean traditional concepts such as constitutional liberty, individualism, and free enterprise. Those values are now, regrettably, aggressive multiculturalism, gender ideology, and wokeism. It speaks volumes when East German AfD leaders win points with their grassroots supporters by disparagingly referring to West Germans as “German-speaking Americans.”
Another AfD campaign issue in Saxony-Anhalt that would resonate with American conservatives is the proposal to end taxpayer funding for NGOs, political party think tanks, and public television and radio. German governments at all levels tend to subsidize everything that moves, and when those institutions have been captured, German taxpayers end up funding left-wing institutions and unwittingly promoting left-wing values. Germany’s publicly funded media outlets—much more powerful than public broadcasting and NPR in the United States—have long waged a propaganda war against conservatives in general and the AfD in particular. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD successfully campaigned on ending such mandated fees.
The AfD’s leader in Saxony-Anhalt is Ulrich Siegmund, a rising young political star with great promise. The 35-year-old Siegmund is a born politician, à la Bill Clinton, who plunges into crowds and talks with people of all views, wearing a constant sunny smile. That he can turn out voters is now beyond doubt. His challenge: Can he govern if given a chance?
Because of Germany’s complicated coalition-building parliamentary system, which works the same at the national and state levels, the AfD still may be kept out of state government in Saxony-Anhalt. Until now, all other German parties have held tightly to the so-called “Brandmauer” (firewall) that keeps the AfD isolated. With 44 percent of the vote, the AfD still needs a coalition partner to forge a majority in the state parliament and elect the new minister-president (equivalent to an American governor). Siegmund might get his majority with the help of the small BSW party (a hodgepodge ideological group that contains former East German communists). Another possibility is that some CDU deputies break with their party and back an AfD state government. The next days and weeks will see considerable back-room political maneuvering in a fundamentally anti-democratic system with more flaws than its framers, fearful of Germany’s Weimar history, ever contemplated.
What is certain is that a hostile press will give no quarter to an AfD government and will seek to capitalize on every mistake. To be sure, the AfD is inexperienced; it may not possess the expertise needed to seamlessly take over responsibility for a state government. But what the elites overlook is that this is an ideological fight—in Saxony-Anhalt and ultimately in Berlin—that has less to do with competence than with values. Siegmund is the kind of new talent who could turn the tables on Germany’s ruling media and political class, even if he has a few missteps along the way.
However things play out, the results in Saxony-Anhalt are very likely to rock Germany’s federal system. This is a good and necessary development for Germany, and ultimately for Europe. It is happening because the CDU stopped being an authentically conservative party.
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