After the political earthquake in Saxony-Anhalt, where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) secured 43.8% of the vote, the reaction of the mainstream media followed the usual script: moral dismay, civic mourning and the reflexive impulse to suspend the democratic legitimacy of those who voted for it.
The electoral flows and demographic breakdowns, after all, leave little room for doubt. This is not a fringe confined to the darkest corners of the internet. It is not a gang of skinheads. It is an electoral avalanche fuelled by blue-collar workers, rural communities, families battered by deindustrialisation and citizens without university degrees. In the post-GDR East, where the scars of the post-reunification shock therapy have never fully healed, these social groups have watched their purchasing power evaporate under the weight of inflation and prohibitive energy bills.
And it matters little that the AfD embodies such a glaring contradiction. The party presents itself as the tribune of the forgotten worker while advocating a markedly neoliberal economic agenda and deregulation policies that would hardly provide structural answers to the very grievances of the voters who support it. That is the stuff of political scientists and seasoned analysts. The people – or at least a large part of them – appear to be responding to other impulses.
Why, then, this advance? Because the AfD has shattered the consensus surrounding some of the most untouchable totems of German and European politics: the green transition and, above all, rearmament. In Saxony-Anhalt, rejection of the federal government’s Zeitenwende – debt-financed military spending and the continuous dispatch of heavy weapons to Ukraine – is visceral. While the media establishment dismisses every doubt as complicity with the Kremlin, a broad swath of the eastern electorate sees military support for Ukraine as an economic drain and a geopolitical escalation that threatens to condemn its factories to closure.
This is where the responsibility of the pro-European ruling classes comes into view. For years, democratic debate has been replaced by an ethical tribunal. Disagreement over industrial policy, migration quotas or Atlanticist strategy has not been met with arguments, but pathologised: anyone who raises objections is not a political opponent, but “Evil”.
After years of sliding into a Manichaean division between Good and Evil, the elites have forgotten the very nature of politics – a realm of compromise, conflict and material negotiation. The political firewall and media ostracism do not merely lose whatever practical sense they might once have had when confronted with a party commanding 43.8% of the vote. They progressively reinforce the conviction that half of the electorate cannot simply be isolated without severing the democratic compact – and that illiberalism can be found on both sides of the political divide.
To escape this dead end, the pedagogical crusade must be abandoned and politics must be restored. We need to confront the real cost of rearmament, reindustrialise the regions left behind by economic transformation, rethink the welfare state and accept negotiation with those who refuse to fall into line.
Otherwise, our rulers will be left with only Bertolt Brecht’s famous advice: dissolve the people of Saxony-Anhalt and elect a better one.
The Solution
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Bertolt Brecht (trans. John Willett)