Published in Newsroom.co.nz (Wellington), 8 September 2026
It does not happen often that I set my alarm to just before 4am to watch the results from a provincial election in Germany. But that is what I did yesterday for Saxony-Anhalt, in Germany’s east.
This election was special in more than one way. It was a test of the popularity of the federal government in Berlin and, as such, a plebiscite on Chancellor Friedrich Merz. But it was also the first time a far-right party, the AfD, had a realistic chance of winning an outright majority.
The expectation was for a bombshell election, and the results were even more dramatic than the polls had suggested.
That the mainstream conservative CDU, Merz’s party, would lose was clear. That it would end up on just over 17 percent, halving its previous result, still came as a shock.
A strong AfD result above 40 percent was also priced in. The nearly 44 percent it received got the party close to an absolute majority.
The rest is splintered between four smaller parties. The Social Democrats, the Greens and the radical-left Die Linke are all around 9 percent, while the populist anti-establishment BSW scraped into Parliament on just over 5 percent.
Altogether, this creates a parliamentary landscape with no clear majority, let alone a stable one. No party is prepared to enter into a coalition with the AfD.
The decimated CDU cannot lead a government that would need confidence and supply from both Die Linke and BSW. The AfD has ruled out trying to form a minority government.
In short, it is an almighty mess.
But it gets worse. If you add up the vote shares of the parties critical of supporting Ukraine (Die Linke, AfD and BSW), with the latter two openly repeating Russian propaganda, you reach nearly 60 percent of the total vote.
Put differently, the parties that for the past decades formed the political establishment of Germany’s federal republic (CDU, SPD, the Greens and the liberal FDP) only achieved 37 percent combined.
Yes, this was ‘only’ an election in one of 16 federal states. And yes, Saxony-Anhalt has only 2.1 million people.
But the election’s significance reaches far beyond that state. It is widely regarded as a sign of major political upheaval.
For months, the AfD has also led the national polls. The same polls show the coalition in Berlin of CDU/CSU and Social Democrats no longer has a majority, and that Merz is the least popular politician in the country.
When Merz first ran for the CDU leadership in 2018, he promised to lead his party back to its old strength and to halve the AfD. In Saxony-Anhalt, precisely the opposite occurred.
His own party lost half its vote, while the AfD scored a result ‘mainstream’ parties can now only dream of. No wonder Merz’s position now looks tenuous.
But Merz’s survival is the least important aspect of this election. What matters more is the future of Germany’s political system.
Until only a few years ago, the old federal republic was a place of remarkable political stability. The parties were generally not populist, and were firmly anchored to the constitution, the market economy and membership of the European Union and Nato. Despite their multiple differences, they were able to form coalitions with one another when political arithmetic required it.
Within this framework, changes of government were possible and peaceful. Still, some Chancellors lasted in office what must nowadays seem like an eternity. Konrad Adenauer governed for 14 years, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel each for 16.
None of these old certainties hold any more.
The countries’ parties have drifted apart ideologically. Some question the basic tenets of Germany’s position within the West, within the EU and vis-à-vis Russia. They have ruled each other out as coalition partners.
Worse, the political system is collapsing just as Germany faces multiple crises. The Ukraine War is in its fifth year, Russia wages hybrid attacks against the West and Nato’s future is in the balance under US President Donald Trump.
The economy has barely grown since 2022, industrial production is below 2019 levels and the car industry is shedding tens of thousands of jobs. Poor growth and demographic change both put pressure on public finances, right at a time when investment needs for infrastructure and defence are enormous.
Meanwhile, the country is still absorbing the migrants who arrived under Merkel’s refugee policy and later the Ukraine War.
To deal with all this, Germany needs institutional stability and a functioning democratic system. As it turns out, it has neither. If anything, Saxony-Anhalt points towards an escalation of political conflict that could leave the state virtually ungovernable.
And it will not stay a special case for long. On September 20, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin both vote. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the AfD sits in the mid-thirties and has led every poll for a year. The Social Democrats may yet survive in government with support from Die Linke. But Merz’s CDU is on around 10 percent, fighting for fourth place in a state it once helped govern.
Berlin is even more complicated. The latest poll puts the CDU on 20 percent, Die Linke on 19, the AfD on 18, the Social Democrats and Greens on 15 each. The capital will struggle to form a government out of that assortment. Germany is not swinging in one direction. It is coming apart in different directions in different places.
There is only one clear winner in all this: Russia. The AfD’s programme calls for ending sanctions and restoring Russian energy imports. It wants to weaken Germany’s military ties to the West and seek a closer relationship with Moscow. And all of this, of course, in the name of promoting ‘peace’ and Germany’s alleged ‘national interests’.
Putin, meanwhile, can look at Germany and see a country that, rather than being an anchor of stability in the European Union, will be busy muddling through its own messes. Such a Germany will hardly come to anyone’s rescue.
Rarely has a German state election delivered such a blow to the political system and Europe’s security order.
I lost a night’s sleep over one provincial election. Germany just lost a whole lot more.
