The results from Germany's most recent federal election did not simply mark another data point in Europe's long drift toward right-wing populism. They marked a threshold. For the first time in the history of the Federal Republic — a constitutional order built explicitly to prevent the return of fascist governance — an openly ethnonationalist party came within reach of an absolute parliamentary majority. That it did not cross that line is cold comfort. That it came this close changes everything about how Europe must now think, plan, and act.
How Close Germany's Far Right Came to an Absolute Majority
What happened in Germany this month was not a protest vote that rounded up at the margins. The Alternative für Deutschland, the AfD election Germany has spent a decade alternately dismissing and dreading, pulled results that put an outright governing majority within striking distance. An absolute majority in the Bundestag requires a party to control more than half the seats — a threshold no single party has claimed in the Federal Republic's post-war history. The AfD came closer to that mark than any far-right formation has ever come in a German federal election since 1949.
To understand what that means, consider the structure that makes it so alarming. Germany's Basic Law was designed with historical self-awareness baked into every article. The constitutional architects of 1949 knew what majoritarian democratic systems could produce when captured by demagogues. They built firewalls: proportional representation, a five-percent threshold to keep fringe parties out of parliament, a Federal Constitutional Court with real teeth, and a president whose role is explicitly to be a guardian of democratic norms rather than a political actor. Those mechanisms held. Barely.
A Historic Threshold: Ethnonationalism at Germany's Door
No openly ethnonationalist party had ever come this close to an absolute majority in a Federal Republic election. That sentence requires sitting with for a moment. The Federal Republic has existed since 1949 — more than 75 years of elections, crises, reunification, economic shocks, and political realignments. Through all of it, the far right remained a peripheral force, occasionally breaching the Bundestag threshold but never commanding enough support to threaten the center's hold on government.
Read next Ukraine War Is Quietly Breaking India's StrategyThe AfD represents something qualitatively different from the right-wing parties that came before it. Its ideology is not merely Eurosceptic or anti-immigration in the way that centre-right parties have occasionally positioned themselves. It is explicitly ethnonationalist. Its leading figures have spoken of deporting citizens with immigrant backgrounds, questioned the constitutional order, and treated Germany's culture of historical responsibility — the Erinnerungskultur that has been central to post-war German identity — as a burden to be discarded rather than a foundation to be honored.
That a party holding these positions came as close as it did to governing alone is not an aberration to be explained away by voter frustration or economic anxiety. It is a structural signal that the post-war consensus in Germany, built painstakingly across generations, is under genuine strain.
The Pro-Russian Dimension: France and the Broader European Pattern
Germany does not exist in isolation. The AfD election Germany just witnessed is part of a transnational pattern that European security analysts at institutions like the European Council on Foreign Relations have been tracking with increasing alarm. What distinguishes this wave from earlier surges of populist right politics is its consistent alignment with Russian strategic interests.
The AfD has long opposed Western military support for Ukraine, criticized sanctions on Russia, and amplified narratives that serve Kremlin messaging objectives. This is not a coincidence of policy overlap. It is a documented pattern of influence, one that European intelligence services and investigative journalists have scrutinized extensively.
France compounds the picture. Pro-Russian forces on the French political spectrum — on both the far right and, to a lesser extent, the far left — have strengthened their position in recent elections. France and Germany are the twin pillars of the European Union. If both simultaneously come under the influence of parties with pro-Russian orientations, the consequences for EU foreign policy and NATO cohesion would be severe. The Bertelsmann Stiftung and similar think tanks have modeled scenarios in which a far-right German government unilaterally curtailed Ukraine aid — the effect on allied resolve would be disproportionate to Germany's military contribution alone, because of the political signal it would send to wavering partners.
The European pattern is no longer a collection of isolated national stories. It is a single story told in different languages.
What Europe Must Now Prepare to Do
Preparation, in this context, is not a synonym for panic. It is the opposite. Panic produces incoherence. Preparation produces resilience. European democracies need to act with the same systematic seriousness that they would apply to any other documented strategic threat — because that is precisely what democratic erosion in Europe's largest economy represents.
Several things must happen simultaneously. First, the EU's existing rule-of-law mechanisms must be strengthened. The tools used against Hungary and Poland — conditionality on EU funding, Article 7 proceedings — were designed for exactly these scenarios. They have been slow and inconsistent. Faster, more automatic triggers are needed. Second, European defense cooperation must be accelerated on a timeline that does not depend on German political continuity. If Germany cannot be counted on to honor its NATO commitments under a future government, other partners need both the capacity and the legal frameworks to act without it. Third, civil society and independent media inside Germany — organizations that have been under sustained financial and political pressure — need European-level support structures that cannot be easily dismantled by a national government.
None of this is about punishing German voters. It is about building systems robust enough to survive the choices that voters in any democracy are legally entitled to make.
The German Question Returns: Historical Memory and Present Danger
There is a phrase — die deutsche Frage, the German question — that haunted European diplomacy from the 19th century through the Cold War. It referred to the destabilizing potential of a unified, powerful Germany that was not securely anchored to a larger European framework. The entire architecture of post-war Europe, from the European Coal and Steel Community forward, was designed to answer that question by making German power inseparable from European cooperation.
That answer depended on Germany remaining a democracy with a functional commitment to its own constitutional order. A Germany governed by an openly ethnonationalist party that questions the Erinnerungskultur, aligns with Russian narratives, and treats European solidarity as optional is not the Germany that the post-war settlement presumed. The German question does not return in the same form it took in 1870, 1914, or 1939. History does not repeat; it rhymes. But the underlying problem — a large, central European state with the capacity to reshape the continent unilaterally, operating outside cooperative frameworks — is structurally identical.
Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, writing for Project Syndicate, has been among the most clear-eyed observers of this trajectory. His warning that Europeans must now prepare for the worst is not the output of alarmism. It reflects the sober judgment of someone who has watched Germany's relationship with its own history with close attention for decades. When veterans of German statecraft reach for the language of worst-case preparation, it is worth listening.
Opinion: The Worst-Case Scenario Is No Longer Hypothetical
The worst-case scenario used to be a useful rhetorical device — invoked to motivate reform, then quietly set aside when immediate crises passed. It is no longer hypothetical. An openly ethnonationalist party nearly won an absolute majority in Germany. Pro-Russian parties are gaining ground in France. The EU's largest member states are simultaneously experiencing pressures that, if they converge, would fundamentally alter what Europe is capable of doing in the world.
The appropriate response to this is not despair, and it is not normalization. Treating the AfD's near-majority as simply a new baseline — adjusting the political Overton window until today's extreme becomes tomorrow's center — is the most dangerous possible reaction. It is how democracies lose ground without noticing.
Europe has been here before in different configurations. The lesson of those moments is not that catastrophe is inevitable. It is that catastrophe becomes inevitable when democracies fail to respond to documented threats with commensurate seriousness. The AfD election Germany has just experienced is a documented threat. The pro-Russian surge across Western Europe is a documented threat. The window for a serious, structured European response is open. It will not stay open indefinitely.
Act now — or spend the next decade explaining why you didn't when you still could.
Source: Project Syndicate
