Germany's AfD Firewall Is Breaking — Who's to Blame?

The AfD's Back-to-Back State Election Wins Explained

Two state elections. Two first-place finishes for the Alternative für Deutschland. In the space of a single September, Germany's established political order received what might fairly be called a structural shock. The AfD's historic victory in Saxony-Anhalt, followed almost immediately by a first-place result in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, marks a turning point that differs qualitatively from prior warnings. These are not protest surges at mid-cycle. They are sustained electoral majorities in Germany's eastern states — a region where the party has been the dominant political force in the polls for years, and is now translating that dominance into something harder to dismiss.

The eastern German states have long been AfD's strongest territory. Since 2017, the party has consistently polled 20 to 30 percent in states like Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg — dramatically outperforming its national numbers. In the 2024 Thuringia state election, AfD took roughly 32 percent of the vote, finishing first for the first time in any German state election. Saxony followed closely. The wins in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in September 2026 extend that trajectory further still, consolidating a pattern that polling houses like INSA and Forsa have documented across the entire decade. The Germany AfD cordon sanitaire — the informal agreement among all other parties to refuse coalition with or any legitimizing contact with the far right — is being tested by consecutive majorities it was never designed to absorb.

What Is Germany's Cordon Sanitaire and Why Did It Exist?

The term is borrowed from Belgium, where mainstream parties formalized a written agreement in 1989 to exclude the Flemish far-right Vlaams Blok from all coalition negotiations. Germany's version has been looser — unwritten, enforced by political norm rather than signed compact — but functionally similar. After the AfD entered the Bundestag in 2017, every mainstream party from the CDU/CSU to the Greens and SPD agreed on one principle: no power-sharing with the AfD at any level of government.

The logic was defensible on its own terms. The AfD had, from its founding, harbored figures whose statements about German history, migration, and Islam crossed into territory that most established democracies would classify as extremist. Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Verfassungsschutz, classified several AfD regional branches as confirmed threats to the constitutional order. Given Germany's specific historical obligations — its Basic Law was written against the backdrop of what happens when democracies capitulate to authoritarian populists — the firewall was framed not as political cowardice but as constitutional responsibility.

Princeton political theorist Jan-Werner Müller, one of the most rigorous analysts of European populism, has noted the genuine tension this creates: a cordon sanitaire can function as a principled defense of democratic norms, but it requires that the parties behind it actually pursue the policy questions driving voters toward the excluded party. Refusing coalition is not a strategy. It is, at best, a holding action.

How the Mainstream Parties Built the Problem They Now Face

This is where the blame is most usefully assigned. The German AfD cordon sanitaire did not fail because the idea was wrong. It failed because the parties that built it never treated it as anything other than a substitute for governing competence.

Eastern Germany's political discontent has structural roots that predate the AfD entirely. Decades of relative economic marginalization, wage gaps between east and west that persisted long after reunification, demographic hollowing as younger workers migrated west — all of this created a political substrate that the established parties diagnosed late and addressed badly. The Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung has documented persistent gaps in east-west income, public infrastructure investment, and political representation in federal institutions that remain visible more than three decades after reunification. The AfD did not cause this resentment. It found it and named it.

Meanwhile, mainstream parties spent the better part of a decade managing the AfD as a communications problem. The CDU under various leaders repeatedly flirted with hardening migration rhetoric to compete for AfD voters, then retreated when condemned for normalizing the fringe. The SPD failed to rebuild a credible working-class identity in a landscape where deindustrialization had eroded its traditional base. The Greens, perceived as an urban party of educated professionals, offered little purchase in communities where economic anxiety was immediate and the priorities of Berlin's progressive politics felt distant or condescending.

None of this is original. Think-tank analysis from the European Council on Foreign Relations has made these points consistently since at least 2019. But the pattern continued regardless. Parties that agreed not to govern with the AfD never found agreement on governing against the conditions that produced it.

The Democratic Dilemma: Is a Political Firewall Legitimate?

The AfD's consecutive first-place finishes have sharpened a question that European political theory has debated for years without resolution: when a party that has finishing first is excluded from government by explicit inter-party agreement, is that democracy functioning well or democracy cannibalizing itself?

The critics of the cordon sanitaire — and they include voices well outside the AfD's own orbit — argue that voters who cast ballots for the first-place party have a reasonable expectation that their votes carry governing weight. When they do not, the signal sent is that certain democratic preferences are simply impermissible — a message that, in the medium term, tends to intensify rather than defuse the grievances behind those preferences. This is not a novel observation. Belgium's cordon sanitaire held the Vlaams Blok and its successor Vlaams Belang in formal exclusion for decades; support for the party grew consistently regardless, eventually making it the largest party in Flanders.

The counter-argument is that not all democratic inputs are equivalent. If a party's platform contains elements incompatible with the constitutional order — the Verfassungsschutz classification matters here — then excluding it from power is itself a democratic act, a defense of the system that makes free elections possible. Germany's Basic Law was designed precisely to prevent a repeat of the constitutional mechanisms through which the Weimar Republic dismantled itself. That design has substantive weight.

Both arguments contain truth, and that is the problem. The legitimacy of the firewall is permanently contestable, which means the parties maintaining it can never simply rest on principle. They must demonstrate through policy that governance without the AfD actually addresses what drove voters to it. So far, that demonstration has been inadequate.

What Comes Next for German Politics If the Firewall Collapses

A firewall that holds formally while losing political credibility is not a firewall. It is a delay. If the AfD continues finishing first in eastern state elections, the practical arithmetic of coalition-building eventually becomes impossible to manage without either including the AfD or constructing governments so remote from the electoral result that their democratic legitimacy is itself a liability.

Two scenarios are now actively in play. In the first, the cordon sanitaire holds in form but splinters in substance — individual CDU figures at the state level begin tacit or informal cooperation with AfD-influenced policy positions, legitimizing the party's agenda while maintaining the fiction of exclusion. This already occurred in Thuringia in limited contexts and represents the worst of both worlds: normalization without accountability. In the second scenario, a formal breakdown occurs, likely beginning at the state level, where a CDU or BSW-led government finds it arithmetically impossible to function without AfD support.

What neither scenario resolves is the underlying problem that has driven the party's rise. A Germany AfD cordon sanitaire can be maintained, revised, or abandoned — but none of those choices does anything about the eastern German towns where the population is aging out, the infrastructure is inadequate, and the governing parties are associated with decades of promises not kept. Political firewalls are instruments of democratic self-defense. They are not substitutes for political seriousness. Germany's mainstream parties built the former and neglected the latter. The back-to-back state election results are the invoice.

Source: Project Syndicate