AfD wins Saxony-Anhalt vote

Alternative für Deutschland’s win in Saxony-Anhalt has become the latest exhibit in a Europe-wide pattern: mainstream parties talk as if they are still in charge while the political weather shifts beneath them. In a Guardian column, Rafael Behr frames the result as especially jarring because it happens in Germany, a country that built postwar institutions explicitly to prevent a return to extremism.

Behr reaches back to Stefan Zweig’s memoir of late 19th-century Vienna, written from exile with the knowledge of what followed. Zweig described an age that trusted tolerance and conciliation and assumed national and sectarian boundaries would dissolve into a shared humanity; he died by suicide in 1942. The point is not that history repeats neatly, but that the mood—confidence that the system will hold—can vanish quickly when electoral incentives reward sharper identities over slower compromises.

The column argues that today’s nationalist movements are not only domestic projects. Behr notes that Elon Musk has used his control of X to boost AfD campaign messages, and that US vice-president JD Vance met AfD co-leader Alice Weidel in Munich while not meeting Olaf Scholz, then Germany’s chancellor. In Behr’s telling, this is not cultural curiosity but alignment: Donald Trump’s national security strategy pledges support for “patriotic resistance” movements opposing what it calls Europe’s “civilisational erasure” by immigration.

That outside attention matters because it changes the cost of radicalism. Marine Le Pen, who has spent years sanding down National Rally’s image, is described as keeping distance from the AfD to protect her own mainstream credentials ahead of France’s presidential election next year, where Behr says she is leading in polls. Yet the AfD is portrayed as so extreme—flirting with Nazi imagery, embracing racist definitions of nationhood, and talking about deporting Germans it deems biologically improper—that even Le Pen sees reputational risk in association.

Behr also sketches a ratchet effect on the right. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is described as losing ground to groups further right, including Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain and Tommy Robinson, whose online reach and ability to mobilise crowds pull the boundary of acceptable rhetoric. Parties that once tried to look “respectable” face competitors who do not need respectability to set the agenda.

The weekend’s Saxony-Anhalt result is one election in one German region. It is also the kind of victory that makes international patrons, domestic imitators, and cautious centrists recalculate what they can say out loud next.