Scary Times: Turns Out Hope Wasn't Enough

The AfD is under suspicion of right-wing extremism and yesterday they won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt with 43.8% of the votes. That's a big enough number that it's hard to explain away as some one-off fluke and yes - I am scared of this.

(Quick context for people outside Germany, since this confuses a lot of people: this was a state election, not a national one. Germany has 16 states, each running its own parliament, schools, police, regional stuff, so it's different from a Bundestagswahl, which is the vote that picks the Chancellor and the federal government. The AfD doesn't run the whole country because of this. But "just a local thing" isn't right either. Over a million real people voted here, this isn't a poll, and when the same thing keeps happening in state after state, especially in East Germany, it's hard to keep treating it as a coincidence.)

None of this is new honestly, the shift to the far-right in East Germany has been building since years already, quietly, while a lot of people just looked the other way. I grew up in a small city in Saxony, and let me tell you - I knew an uncountable number of racist people while nobody was pointing to this growing issue in society. What changed now is that it's not just a feeling or a number on a chart anymore. It's a government that gets to decide things for people, and somehow that lands very different than a poll result ever did.

I also don't think it's fair to just call this "another populist party." Historians and journalists keep pointing out how close some of the language sits to old NSDAP rhetoric, "the German people," "who really belongs here," phrases that sound almost harmless until you know where they come from. Take the word "remigration," named Germany's Un-word of the Year 2023 for a reason since it's a softer wrapper around something much darker, and it's sitting right there in the AfD's own program as "remigration programs." Linguists call this whitewashed extremist vocabulary, dressed up so it sounds okay at the dinner table. A party leader called Hitler and the Nazis a mere "bird dropping" in over a thousand years of German history once, which isn't just a slip of the tongue when you consider that courts have already convicted party figures for using actual Nazi slogans.

This is scary in a very concrete way for me. I think about people of color and the LGBTQIA+ community when I read stuff like this, about disabled people, Muslims, Jews, refugees, immigrants. Even Germans whose families have been here for generations still get asked where they're "really" from sometimes, and honestly it's scary for anyone who just doesn't match the AfD's small picture of who belongs here.

It gets worse once you look at what they'd actually do with power. Their own top candidate in Saxony-Anhalt already floated abolishing the regional domestic intelligence agency entirely, or at least weakening it enough that it can't investigate the AfD anymore, an agency that exists specifically because of what happened after 1945, built so a party like this could be stopped in time. On the national level it's pretty much the same playbook, defund the NGOs and civil society groups that criticize them and call it "neutrality." What that word is actually covering for is defunding the people who fight for refugees and for civil rights.

The part that actually makes me angry is how the AfD sells itself as the party of the "little man," the voice for people who feel left behind, while their actual tax plans say the opposite. They want to abolish the inheritance tax and the wealth tax too, which hits large fortunes and rich people, not ordinary workers. So all the talk about standing up for the poor comes with policy that mostly helps people who already have the most, and less tax money means less for schools and healthcare, less for the stuff the people they claim to represent actually rely on. I wouldn't call that solidarity with the poor.

The CDU and the AfD have never been closer

For decades the CDU had one rule, no cooperation with the AfD, ever, and people called it the "Brandmauer," the firewall. Merz broke it for the first time in January 2025 when he pushed a migration motion through the Bundestag that only passed because of AfD votes. Even Angela Merkel, from his own party, criticized him publicly for it, while the AfD called it a historic day. As far as I can tell the CDU's bet was something like: sound tougher on migration, borrow some AfD positions, and the voters drifting right come back home. In German, "halbieren," cutting the AfD's support in half by copying it.

It didn't really work out that way in Saxony-Anhalt. The CDU crashed to its worst-ever result there, 17.2%, while the AfD hit a record high in the same election, so instead of halving the AfD, the CDU basically pushed a chunk of its own voters over to them.

Merz keeps adding to this pattern. In October 2025 he brought up a "Stadtbild" problem, saying German cities still had a "problem in the cityscape" in a context tied directly to migration and deportations, and even people inside his own coalition called it racist dog-whistling. There's also his family history, which he doesn't love talking about. His grandfather, Josef Paul Sauvigny, was mayor of Brilon during the Nazi era, an "Oberscharführer" in the SA and NSDAP member who had two streets renamed after Hitler and Göring while in office, and Merz downplayed it for years, even sued a newspaper over it once. None of this makes Merz the AfD, though it's fair to say he keeps blurring a line he claims to defend instead of just holding it.

Official reports from the domestic intelligence agency itself describe the AfD as confirmed or suspected right-wing extremist, and still, until now, there's been no court case, no formal process to ban the party, not once. The one legal tool built exactly for a moment like this has just sat there unused this whole time. I genuinely don't get why nobody's used it yet.

I'm still stuck in this kind of frozen, helpless feeling about all of this most days, and I won't pretend that's easy to shake. But "someone else will fix it" stopped being a real plan a while ago, that someone else clearly isn't coming.

But there's one thing I keep thinking about

About 1.7 million people in Saxony-Anhalt could vote, and around 1.2 million actually did. 43.8% of that comes out to roughly 530,000 people. Germany has 84 million people total, so less than 1% of the whole country voted AfD yesterday, which doesn't make what happened okay, and it doesn't take away the fear this creates for the people it's aimed at. Still, I think it's worth keeping in mind that most of the country didn't vote for this.

What the numbers look like for people under 18

Before every real election, Germany runs a "U18" mock vote where kids and teenagers under voting age can cast a symbolic ballot, and in Saxony-Anhalt, 3,123 young people took part just before this one, with a result that looks nothing like the adult vote. To be fair: It's a self-selected group of young people who chose to participate, so it's not statistically representative. But it's still a real signal, because it might mean the far-right shift isn't equally strong across every age group, and that younger people, who'll actually be shaping this country for the next decades, are pulling somewhere different than yesterday suggests. It doesn't prove anything on its own, but I take it as a small reason for hope anyway.

What I'm actually doing now

I decided I don't want to just sit with the fear anymore. I'm going to get more involved. I'll look for NGOs that fight for democracy and for people who don't have privilege on their side, and support them with whatever little money I have, plus my time where money isn't enough. I keep asking why nobody does something. At some point I have to be one of those people too.

You might see political posts here from time to time, even though I'm honestly not interested in arguing with anyone about it (if I don't reply to your comment, you're probably muted for a reason, deal with it). I always avoided this topic before, (a) to keep the (in my opinion) wrong kind of people off my blog, (b) because I genuinely struggle with the feelings that come up writing about it, but staying quiet is its own kind of privilege, especially next to people who've dealt with this since years for real, not just as a headline.

I want to hold onto that U18 number, not because it proves anything yet, but because it shows something still moving in the (in my opinion) right direction, at least in this one small corner of the country. I hope it's the same for young people everywhere, that the next generation pushes back harder than we expect. I don't know if that hope is realistic, honestly, but I'm holding onto it anyway.

I've said "someone else will fix it" too many times in the past,
and I'd rather not say it again.