6, 2026. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)
AfD co-chairwoman Alice Weidel watches at an election party of the “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) after the Saxony-Anhalt state elections in Magdeburg, eastern Germany, Sunday, Sept.
The AfD’s own Saxony-Anhalt branch, the one that just won 43.9 per cent, is classified by that state’s intelligence service as confirmed right-wing extremist. Whether the AfD forms Germany’s first far-right state government since 1945 or merely watches its opponents fail to form anything, the party gains, and both the Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern elections are two weeks away.
The domestic intelligence agency classified the party as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation in May 2025 after a report running past 1,100 pages, then suspended the label pending litigation; a court has since held that the agency may not use the “confirmed” tag, while the interior minister maintains that the party remains a legitimate object of observation. Chrupalla said the voters had struck it down, which is the sort of claim that sounds like spin until you count seats. The German state does not agree. Weidel’s answer, delivered each time with the patience of someone explaining a spreadsheet, is that the whole apparatus is politically motivated. Roughly six voters in Saxony-Anhalt out of ten disagreed with the classification enough not to care. To govern without the AfD, the CDU must assemble something delicate involving the Left party, which the CDU has also sworn never to touch. A firewall that requires two mutually exclusive vows is not a firewall; it is a scheduling conflict.
What actually broke on Sunday was not the AfD’s ceiling but the arithmetic of the Brandmauer, the firewall by which every other German party has refused coalition with the AfD.