Filip Gaspar
September’s state elections may be the German establishment’s final test as to whether it can ward off right-wing populism and allay its concerns.
Over the last 10 years, the United Kingdom voted for Brexit, Donald Trump won the White House twice, and populist parties surged across Europe. Germany alone seemed immune. Familiar parties remained in power, and the country appeared insulated from the forces reshaping other democracies. For observers of the West’s troubled relationship with its own political traditions, Germany was the last reassurance that liberal democracy could hold. That reassurance is beginning to crack.
This September, voters in Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Berlin will cast ballots in state elections that may prove to be Germany’s most significant since reunification. For Washington, the stakes extend well beyond the ballot count. Europe’s largest economy, NATO’s indispensable continental anchor, and America’s most consequential partner in Europe is undergoing a political transformation with direct implications for the transatlantic alliance.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) now leads national polling with roughly 29 percent support in June. In eastern Germany, it has become the dominant force. Yet the real story is not simply the rise of one party. It is the slow collapse of the postwar consensus that governed Germany after the Cold War.
September’s elections will provide the first real test of whether Germany’s governing class can still contain this movement. It may show that Germany, long regarded as the last bastion of Western stability, has finally arrived at the same reckoning that has transformed much of the democratic world.
Throughout the postwar era, German politics rested on an unusually stable foundation. Power alternated between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, two broad catch-all parties that together often commanded well over 60 percent of the vote. Elections determined who governed, but they rarely challenged the underlying assumptions of the system itself. Consensus, moderation, and gradual change defined post-reunification German politics for decades. That era is ending.
Germany’s traditional governing parties did not begin to decline with the rise of the AfD. Their erosion was already well underway before the right-wing, nationalist party emerged as a political force. Election after election, the CDU/CSU and SPD lost ground while smaller parties steadily gained support. Coalition negotiations became more difficult, governments grew less stable, and voters began to question whether elections still produced meaningful change.
Nor did the AfD create this crisis. It capitalized on it. Like many populist movements across the West, the party grew because it gave voice to frustrations that had been building for years. Its rise was less a sudden rupture than the visible manifestation of a deeper loss of confidence in Germany’s governing class.
The economic backdrop to that discontent is not abstract. Germany, for decades a synonym for industrial strength and full employment, is undergoing a painful reckoning. Volkswagen, the icon of the German economic miracle, may be facing the gravest crisis in its history as an automobile manufacturer. The company is working on a radical restructuring affecting up to 140,000 jobs worldwide, with 50,000 cuts in Germany alone. Four German plants may receive no new vehicle models. For millions of Germans, this is not a statistic. It is the end of a certainty that defined their lives.
But the economic pressure is not the only source of that discontent. The decisive turning point came in 2015. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to admit hundreds of thousands of migrants transformed German politics in ways that continue to shape the country today. Supporters regarded the policy as a humanitarian necessity. Critics viewed it as evidence that the government had surrendered control over one of the most basic responsibilities of a sovereign state: the decision of who may enter the country.
Regardless of where one stands on that debate, its consequences are difficult to dispute. Millions of Germans saw the issue as about more than immigration; Merkel had made decisions affecting national identity, sovereignty, and the country’s future composition without meaningful public consent. The distrust that had once centered on a single policy gradually expanded into distrust of the governing class itself. The AfD was simply the principal beneficiary of that shift.
Originally founded as a Eurosceptic movement opposing the common currency, the party reinvented itself after the migration crisis as the primary vehicle for voters who believed that Germany’s governing class no longer represented them. What many observers dismissed as a temporary protest vote proved to be something far more durable. Migration may have ignited the revolt, but years of economic stagnation, rising energy prices, declining confidence in public institutions, and dissatisfaction with successive governments have sustained it. The party’s continued rise reflects not merely approval of its own program, but growing frustration with the parties that have governed Germany for most of the postwar era.
It was in response to this transformation that Germany’s political establishment constructed what became known as the “firewall,” or Brandmauer. Refusing cooperation with the AfD was initially presented as an exceptional measure. It was described as a temporary safeguard against a party deemed outside the constitutional mainstream. Over time, however, the firewall evolved from a tactical decision into the organizing principle of German politics itself.
In most democracies, electoral success increases a party’s prospects of governing. In Germany, the opposite increasingly became true. The stronger the AfD grew, the more determined every other major party became to keep it out of power. On current polling, nearly one in three German voters will support a party that every other major party refuses to govern with.
For years, that strategy appeared sustainable. The AfD remained isolated, while broad anti-AfD coalitions continued to command parliamentary majorities. Today, those assumptions are becoming harder to sustain. Germany’s future, if it can be glimpsed anywhere, is in the eastern states. More than three decades after reunification, eastern Germany continues to vote differently from the West. Analysts often explain this divide through economic, demographic, or lingering effects of communist rule. Those factors matter, but they are no longer sufficient explanations of the region’s political trajectory.
Eastern Germany manifested the populist trend relatively early. Disillusionment with the established parties, skepticism toward centralized authority, and support for populist alternatives all reached higher levels in the former communist state long before they spread westward. In Saxony-Anhalt, the heart of eastern Germany, the AfD now polls around 40 percent, well ahead of every competitor.
Should current polling prove accurate, the AfD will emerge as the dominant party in the state. Every conceivable coalition excluding it would require parties with fundamentally different agendas to unite for one overriding purpose: preventing the election winner from exercising power.
Legally, there is nothing undemocratic about such arrangements. In practice, however, they become harder to sustain as the gap between electoral strength and governing power widens.
At some point, a firewall designed to isolate one party begins to reshape the entire system around that objective.
This is the paradox confronting Germany today. The stronger the AfD becomes, the more indispensable the firewall appears to its defenders. Yet every election that reinforces the firewall also strengthens the AfD’s central argument: millions of Germans can vote for change without ever receiving it.
When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz returned to lead the Christian Democrats, many conservatives believed he represented the CDU’s last opportunity to reverse its decline. Unlike his predecessor Angela Merkel, Merz promised a sharper conservative profile: restoring border controls, reviving the economy, and reversing a decade of drift. His message was straightforward: voters who had defected to the AfD could be won back without abandoning the center.
It was a plausible strategy. Many observers assumed the AfD’s support reflected dissatisfaction with Merkel rather than a more fundamental realignment. Once the CDU spoke the language of conservative governance again, protest voters would return.
That assumption now faces its first serious test. Nationally, the CDU trails the AfD by six percentage points. In Saxony-Anhalt, the Christian Democrats are projected to receive a little over half as much support as the AfD. A party that once defined itself as the institutional anchor of the Federal Republic, the home of Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, now struggles to reach half the vote share it once considered its baseline.
Merz may discover that changing a party’s rhetoric is easier than rebuilding the trust it has lost. Voters who have abandoned the CDU are not necessarily waiting for a slightly more conservative version of the same party. Many appear to have concluded that the CDU is inextricably linked to the governing class they no longer trust. Should the elections confirm current polling, Germany’s crisis cannot be explained solely as a reaction against Merkel’s legacy. September will test whether Germany’s traditional center-right still possesses the capacity to absorb public discontent, or whether that role has permanently passed to another party.
More broadly, Germany illustrates a question confronting democracies across the West. How long can governing parties continue to lose public confidence while preserving institutions built for an earlier era? At what point does excluding a large and growing section of the electorate from power begin to undermine confidence in democracy itself? Moreover, setting aside the question of whether liberal democracy can defeat its external enemies, can it still command the loyalty of its own citizens?
For most of the postwar era, Germany seemed to occupy a category of its own. Its history imposed a particular responsibility, and a particular caution toward anything that smelled of nationalism or revolt against the liberal order. That exceptionalism had its uses. It also had a cost. Questions that were openly contested elsewhere were suppressed in Germany for years. September suggests they were never resolved. They were only waiting.
All of this gives September an unusual weight. If the polls hold, the AfD will win in Saxony-Anhalt by a margin the established parties have not seen there in decades. A party that barely cleared the 5-percent threshold 10 years ago will likely become the dominant force in a state of more than 2 million people.
The implications for Washington are concrete. A Germany consumed by internal political crisis will not reliably anchor NATO’s eastern flank, sustain support for Ukraine, or hold firm against Russian energy dependence. The alliance has long assumed a stable, outward-looking Berlin. That assumption is no longer guaranteed.
A deeper question remains unanswered. Not whether Germany can contain the AfD, but whether it can address the conditions that made the AfD necessary. That is the question every Western democracy will eventually have to face. Germany is simply the latest to run out of time.
*Filip Gašpar is a political advisor and publicist with Croatian roots in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He specializes in strategic communication, international positioning, and conservative networks. He regularly writes for German and international outlets, as well as various media outlets across the former Yugoslavia. He also coordinates literary translations in the post-Yugoslav region. He has previously written for The European Conservative.
Source: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-germanys-postwar-consensus-is-failing
