Germansplainer

Germany just had the worst election night of its post-war democratic history. The reactions may be more alarming than the result. A social democrat’s stocktake.
Some election nights are a snapshot. Sunday was a diagnosis.
In Saxony-Anhalt — a small eastern state of 2.1 million people, poor, old, and long treated by Berlin as a rounding error — the far-right AfD took 43.8 percent. Five years ago it was 20.8. The Christian Democrats, who have run this state since reunification, collapsed from 37.1 to 17.2, their worst result ever here. Minister-President Sven Schulze lost his own constituency in Magdeburg. My party, the SPD, “improved” to 9.3 percent, which is a bit like saying the patient only coughed twice today. Greens 8.9, the Left 8.6, the Wagenknecht party (BSW) scraped in at 5.3, the liberal FDP crashed out at 2.6.
The number that actually matters isn’t in the results table. 61 percent of blue-collar workers voted AfD. Five years ago it was a third. Among under-25s: 42 percent AfD, 18 percent Left, 14 percent Greens. And the AfD pulled roughly 170,000 votes out of the pool of previous non-voters.
Let that sit. A party classified by Germany’s domestic intelligence service as confirmed right-wing extremist is now the workers’ party of a German state. Not rhetorically. Empirically.
And since Sunday evening, everyone has been talking about themselves.

The Christian Democrats: same course, more vigour

From the CDU leadership you hear that the priority now is a “stable federal government,” and that the reforms must be continued “with vigour.” The reforms in question are welfare cuts and rearmament — the exact course that has made Chancellor Friedrich Merz so unpopular that his own party preferred not to put him on the campaign posters here.
And from the friendly commentariat: the government simply needs to explain it better. Communicate it better. As though people rejecting a decline in their own living standards were suffering from a comprehension problem.
Partying Agenda 2030 like it’s Agenda 2010. (For non-Germans: Agenda 2010 was the Schröder government’s labour-market and welfare overhaul of the early 2000s. It cut unemployment protection, and it is the single deepest wound in my party’s relationship with its own voters. We are currently re-opening it with a defence budget attached.)
The second reflex: we were elected for four years. True. A mandate is not an answer to the question of why nobody believes you anymore.

The bourgeois right: already three moves ahead

The most honest — and therefore most unsettling — reaction is coming from the free-market right. In parts of the WELT newsroom and the liberal-conservative commentariat, people are quietly preparing for the expansion of the “bourgeois camp” now that the Brandmauer has fallen. (The Brandmauer, “firewall,” is the cross-party pledge never to govern with the AfD. It was a pledge, never a policy.)
These people have understood something the centre refuses to: that Trump, Milei, Farage, Le Pen and Meloni are not a series of national accidents but one international phenomenon in a West in crisis. And the calculation is simple. With the radical right in office, you can push market-radical policy without the tiresome business of sectoral bargaining, works councils and social partnership.
So they will not want it on the record that they argued against the AfD when the time comes — first in Magdeburg, then federally. You need trust later, if you want to be a state secretary, or keep your access as a journalist.
There will be a great many weathervanes. Note who is still spinning today.

“Our democracy”: the tone that makes it worse

Now to the milieu I am closer to than I’d like. When you hear about “our democratic heart,” about “our democracy,” listen for the possessive. We own this state. We own civil society. Would the rabble kindly stop interfering.
This is the Hillary Clinton register. Deplorables. And the smaller this milieu gets, the more it feels pushed out of a position of natural authority, the shriller the voter-scolding becomes. It is a closed loop, and every turn of it feeds the AfD.
The forbidden thought is a different one: that fifteen to twenty years of governing is itself the reason for this result. A party does not grow from 4.7 percent nationally in 2013 to 43.8 percent in a state in 2026 because voters suddenly turned wicked. It grows because two decades of lived experience taught people that things get worse and nobody is ever held responsible. At some point they think: how much worse can it get? Anything but them.

The Left: posture yes, class politics no

The Left party got its bill for counting itself rhetorically among “the democratic parties” — the same parties presiding over the decline. The firewall message (vote for anything, just not them) lent it votes and cost it a profile. It prevented nothing.
And after the election, more of the same. With 61 percent of workers voting AfD, the message is “don’t be afraid, we won’t abandon you” — addressed to marginalised groups, to young people, to the already convinced. None of it wrong. But it is the sound of the small-town antifa in the besieged autonomous social centre, everyone reassuring each other that they still exist, while outside the tornado cuts its lane. The demonstrations happen in Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin, Magdeburg. Not in Quedlinburg, Zerbst, Dessau-Roßlau.
“All of Berlin hates the AfD” is a lovely line. It’s also no longer true. Even in Berlin the AfD has led polls for the coming city election.

The BSW: kingmaker with a short shelf life

Sahra Wagenknecht’s party is, in its way, a winner: in parliament by a hair, with momentum heading into Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. My own forecast — that her strategy would immediately turn her voters into AfD voters — was wrong.
Medium-term I still think it happens. Negotiating with the AfD now, positioning yourself as the party that indirectly makes an AfD-led government possible, normalises them inside your own electorate. And it will cost the honest leftists who joined because they saw the only consistently anti-militarist force in German politics — and who have not yet abandoned their anti-fascist inhibition. The old contradictions remain: one theme, and a story of class harmony told in the middle of a sharpening class conflict. Re-opening Nord Stream 2 is not an economic policy. It’s a hope about a price.

And us?

Here’s the uncomfortable part. The SPD sits in Berlin as junior partner in a government whose course just got flattened in Saxony-Anhalt. We are on 9.3 percent and calling it an upward trend. We have lost the workers we were founded to represent to a party that will not improve their wages, pensions or job protection — it will take them.
You can answer that with indignation. Or with work.
Work means material before moral. Wages, rents, a doctor in the village, a bus that runs, an employer that stays. It means showing up where we no longer have a local branch — Sangerhausen, Köthen, Burg, not only Halle and Magdeburg. It means no longer treating criticism of our own government’s course as a contribution to the far-right surge. And it means being able to sit with the sentence: a social democracy that co-signs welfare cuts can no longer explain its own name.
The firewall fell because it was never a policy, only an announcement. What’s needed now isn’t an announcement. It’s reasons.
Dark times, yes. But darkness is not an argument against work. It’s only an argument against talking to ourselves.