Why AfD Appeals to So Many Germans

Why the Far Right Appeals to So Many Germans

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Why AfD Appeals to So Many Germans

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Why AfD Appeals to So Many Germans

The far-right party surges in a regional election.

By **Cameron Abadi**, a deputy editor at *Foreign Policy*, and **Adam Tooze**, a columnist at *Foreign Policy* and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. Sign up for Adam’s Chartbook newsletter here.

!A supporter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) holds up a placard that shows AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund just before initial results showed the party with 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt state elections, in Magdeburg, Germany, on Sept. 6.

*A supporter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) holds up a placard that shows AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund just before initial results showed the party with 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt state elections, in Magdeburg, Germany, on Sept. 6.*

A supporter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) holds up a placard that shows AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund just before initial results showed the party with 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt state elections, in Magdeburg, Germany, on Sept. 6. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Listen to the full podcast

September 11, 2026, 4:30 PM

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**Prefer to listen?** To hear this entire conversation, and more episodes in the weeks ahead, follow *Ones and Tooze*wherever you get your podcasts.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party received 43.8 percent of the vote in the regional election of the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt last weekend, putting it in position to potentially lead the next state government. That would mark a historical event, as no far-right party has led a state government since World War II; it also marks a constitutional challenge to postwar Germany’s commitment to liberal democracy.

What exactly was the AfD’s policy program for the state? Is identity politics more central to its appeal than material policies? And what can progressives learn from the AfD’s success?

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party received 43.8 percent of the vote in the regional election of the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt last weekend, putting it in position to potentially lead the next state government. That would mark a historical event, as no far-right party has led a state government since World War II; it also marks a constitutional challenge to postwar Germany’s commitment to liberal democracy.

What exactly was the AfD’s policy program for the state? Is identity politics more central to its appeal than material policies? And what can progressives learn from the AfD’s success?

Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host,*Ones and Tooze*. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for*Ones and Tooze*wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’sSubstack newsletter.

**Cameron Abadi:** States in Germany have a lot of power to determine policies across a number of major domains, from security to education to culture. What exactly is the AfD’s proposed policy program for the state?

**Adam Tooze:** It’s worth saying that the AfD has many faces, and your question points us to the most respectable face of the AfD. And you only have to go on Twitter or YouTube or your favorite social media channel to see videos of AfD and Saxony-Anhalt which show it as a party of skinhead thugs, of people blaring out openly racist rap songs, using the N-word. It’s a dirty party. The people elected to parliament include well-known far-right activists, porn producers, people with criminal records. It’s playing in the dirty end of German society.

But then if you look online and you look at its party program, it’s extraordinary. I mean, it’s really night-and-day contrast. So, if you look online and want to take the time reading their program, I would describe it as deeply dry conservative in terms of the old distinctions within British politics. This is a dry conservative version of German history and German politics. It’s not populist. It’s not plebeian. It’s not MAGA. It isn’t the crazy stuff that was coming out of Homeland Security in the U.S. with super macho powered-up images of men defending the nation against alien invaders. The language is there, but the iconography, the style is very, very different. And it reminds me of the tone—I can’t help thinking of conservative high school teachers that I knew as a kid in West Germany—sort of a lecture about restoring the core values of German national culture.

So the argument is basically that the establishment parties are selling Germany out through climate policy, through migration policy, through a policy that rejects Germany’s own history, through migration, which is, of course, welcoming, above all, Muslim men who undermine the basic cultural values of German society. It’s very multilayered. They’ve had some intellectuals at work on this program. If you dig into the AfD podcast, YouTube scene, you’ll see there are people talking about \[Italian philosopher Antonio] Gramsci and hegemony.

And then they have a program for their first hundred days in office, which is really pure culture war. It is immediate deportations as soon as we can get them organized. It is cutting funding for public broadcasting because they’re systematically biased against us. It is reevaluating the priorities of Saxony-Anhalt’s government. So part of Saxony-Anhalt’s claim to fame is it was home to one part of the Bauhaus modernist movement of