AfD win in Saxony-Anhalt exposes Merz government’s blind spot

Germany’s ruling coalition is playing a dangerous game by refusing to reckon with the AfD’s sweeping victory in Saxony-Anhalt, a leading expert on East German politics warned this week, saying the silence from Berlin risks turning a regional setback into a national crisis.

A result that can’t be wished away

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland secured roughly 38 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt’s recent state election, a result that left the established parties scrambling for explanations — and largely failing to find convincing ones. For Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s coalition, the instinct has been to look away. That instinct, according to political scientist Dr. Jana Weiss of Leipzig University, is exactly the wrong one.

“When voters feel their choices are being treated as an embarrassment rather than a message, they don’t come back to the mainstream — they dig in deeper,” she said. “The AfD understands this. Berlin still doesn’t.”

East Germany’s patience has run out

There’s a longer story behind the numbers. Saxony-Anhalt has one of Germany’s highest rates of working-age population decline, with some rural districts losing more than 25 percent of residents since 2000. Wages remain stubbornly below the national average. And the sense that decisions affecting everyday life are made by politicians who’ve never set foot east of the Elbe hasn’t faded — it’s hardened.

So when Merz’s government rolled out economic reform packages in recent months that were largely designed around industrial hubs in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, the reaction in places like Magdeburg and Dessau wasn’t just indifference. It was anger.

Still, the federal response has been muted. Coalition spokespeople have largely described the Saxony-Anhalt result as a “regional phenomenon,” a framing that Weiss called “almost insulting in its laziness.”

Ignoring voters is its own political strategy — a losing one

But here’s the trap. By refusing to acknowledge the AfD’s win as a legitimate signal from legitimate voters — many of them not ideological extremists but simply fed-up workers and pensioners — Merz’s government isn’t neutralising the far right. It’s fuelling it.

Weiss puts it bluntly: every percentage point the mainstream ignores is a percentage point the AfD banks for the next election.

The coalition currently holds a fragile majority in the Bundestag, with internal tensions between the CDU/CSU and SPD already surfacing over budget priorities. A string of poor regional results between now and 2026 could make that majority functionally useless even before a federal vote is called.

What comes next

There are no easy fixes. Weiss doesn’t pretend otherwise. But she argues that a direct political acknowledgment — not a policy paper, not a task force, but a genuine public reckoning with voter discontent in the east — is the minimum starting point.

Without it, she warns, the 2025 federal election map could look very different from anything Berlin is currently planning for. And by then, it won’t just be Saxony-Anhalt.