Published in Newsroom.co.nz (Wellington), 19 May 2026
Observers of European politics know Alternative for Germany as a right-wing populist party, probably extreme and certainly friendly to Russia. Less visible from the outside is that the AfD is not an ordinary opposition party that might win an election, govern badly and then be voted out.
The AfD’s goal is to change the fundamental structures of the German state. Though such a transformation is still some distance at the federal level in Berlin, the small eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt already shows what this means in practice. The changes are beginning before the AfD has even taken office.
The party’s lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, makes no secret of the ambition. “From Saxony-Anhalt, step by step, reshape Germany’s political map,” his campaign website reads. “One state after another.”
Last week, Siegmund told the regional daily Mitteldeutsche Zeitung that his party would replace 150-200 civil servants if it wins the state election in September. He was not talking about ministers replacing their personal staff and leadership teams, which is normal when governments change in Germany. He wants to reach deep into the middle ranks of the state administration.
“Large sections of the middle echelons are not politically aligned,” he said. Officials who might “obstruct” the AfD’s work would need to go.
The German system is built on precisely the opposite principle. When a new government takes office, it replaces the departments’ immediate leadership teams. The voters chose a new direction, and the people at the top of the public service must be willing and able to implement it.
Everyone else remains. The career civil servants who run the schools, assess the taxes, process the permits and staff the prisons do not change when governments change. They serve the state, not any party.
Germany built its post-war constitutional order on that distinction, after 1945. They did not want to repeat what happened when the Nazis captured the state apparatus and turned it into an instrument of the party.
I recently argued New Zealand should adopt a version of Germany’s model, where ministers choose their top officials. Some critics took that as a call for wholesale politicisation. But there is a gulf between allowing ministerial direction to appoint top officials and politicising the entire apparatus of the state.
Appointing the state secretary who runs a ministry is democratic accountability, ensuring that elections have consequences and that the government’s programme can be implemented by people who believe in it. Every serious democracy allows this.
Even in the United States, where political appointees reach further down than in most countries, the bulk of the career civil service has long been protected from political dismissal. That settlement held for as long as both main parties accepted the same constitutional framework. The AfD and the Trump MAGA movement both depart from that framework, and both want to reach past the political layer into the career ranks.
Siegmund is proposing the same kind of break, openly and at the level of a German state. Purging career officials in the middle ranks because they are “not politically aligned” politicises the state apparatus. Ministerial appointments strengthen democracy, but mass purges of career officials destroy it.
It is also illegal and protected by both the federal and state constitutions. The Beamtenrecht, Germany’s civil service law, protects officials from dismissal for political reasons. Furthermore, decades of court decisions have reinforced the boundaries of political appointments, limiting them to a narrow set of senior positions where political trust is genuinely required.
Siegmund’s proposal to replace officials deep into the middle ranks does not sit in a grey area. It violates the legal framework that every German government since 1949 has respected. The proper word for what he describes is not reform. It is proto-totalitarian: installing a party apparatus inside the state.
Tragically, the AfD is not the only force dismantling the careful calibrations of the post-war order. The mainstream parties are doing it too, from the opposite direction.
In April, every party in the Saxony-Anhalt parliament except the AfD voted to amend the state constitution. The changes strip the largest party of its traditional right to nominate the parliament’s president, allowing smaller parties to combine and elect their own candidate. They also alter the rules for appointing constitutional court judges and make it harder for the AfD to convene parliamentary inquiry committees.
The established parties used their current two-thirds majority to rewrite the rules of the game before an election they expect to lose. They called it “strengthening democracy” though it is hard to see how weakening the parliamentary rights of the party most voters support strengthens anything.
The changes may even backfire. By reducing the majorities required for key parliamentary decisions, the mainstream parties have made those decisions easier for any party that wins an outright majority. If the AfD achieves what the polls suggest, the rules the other parties are setting up to constrain it could work in its favour.
One CDU official said anyone who has no evil plans for the country has nothing to fear from the reform. That is the language of a system that has decided the voters cannot be trusted.
The panic has a context.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz marks his first anniversary in office as the most unpopular post-war chancellor, leading a coalition with the SPD that argues without finding common ground. Compromises, when they come at all, tend to fall apart in the implementation phase.
The AfD did not create the conditions behind its rise. External shocks have hit hard: economic stagnation, an energy shock from the strikes on Iran, a car industry squeezed between Chinese competition and US tariffs. But the domestic failure runs deeper. Voters in de-industrialised eastern towns have been ignored, systematically, by successive governments whose mainstream politicians treated their frustrations as an embarrassment rather than a problem to understand.
The AfD has filled the space the established parties left open. Without governing a single state, the mere prospect of an AfD majority has been enough to provoke them into dismantling the very norms they claim to protect. And the AfD’s own plans, now laid out openly in a newspaper interview, reveal a party with no intention of governing within the existing constitutional framework.
The AfD is polling at 42 percent in Saxony-Anhalt. The election is in September. If the party wins, it will control the police, the schools, the prisons and the entire bureaucracy of a German state.
The post-war settlement will not collapse in September. But from both sides, the erosion of its norms has already begun. And that is how constitutional orders eventually come undone.
