Germany has crossed a political threshold that would have seemed almost unthinkable a decade ago. In today’s state election in Thuringia, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, is projected to finish first with roughly one-third of the vote, ahead of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union. In neighbouring Saxony, the AfD is also competing closely with the CDU and is expected to finish with another very large share of the vote. The result does not mean the AfD will necessarily govern either state, because almost every other major party has ruled out coalition cooperation with it. Yet the symbolism is unavoidable: a party classified by Thuringia’s domestic intelligence authorities as right-wing extremist has become the strongest electoral force in one German state, while its leader there, Björn Höcke, has repeatedly generated controversy over nationalist rhetoric and was convicted earlier this year for using a banned Nazi slogan. The immediate explanation will focus on immigration, dissatisfaction with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government and eastern Germany’s political alienation. The deeper question is more difficult: why can a region become objectively wealthier while large numbers of voters become increasingly convinced that the political and economic system is leaving them behind?
That contradiction is visible in the economic data. Eastern Germany remains poorer than western Germany, but by several measures the gap has narrowed substantially over the past decade. Output per person has grown faster in the east, unemployment has fallen while western unemployment edged upwards, and eastern wages have risen more rapidly. Yet eastern workers still earn considerably less: Reuters reported a median gross monthly wage of around €3,013 in the east compared with €3,655 in the west, while unemployment remained about 7.8% against 5.1%. Wealth differences are even more persistent, with inheritance and accumulated assets heavily concentrated in western Germany. The political lesson is therefore not that perceptions are simply irrational because averages improved. Relative deprivation depends on the reference point voters use. A worker can be better off than ten years ago and still feel disadvantaged if someone performing similar work in another part of the same country remains substantially richer. Economic progress does not eliminate dissatisfaction when the comparison group moves too.
This is a basic but often misunderstood distinction between absolute and relative welfare. Suppose a person’s income rises from €2,500 to €3,000 while someone they consider comparable rises from €3,000 to €3,700. The first person’s absolute income has improved, but their relative position has worsened. Standard economic measures record the income gain. Political psychology can record the widening difference. Both are real. Governments therefore make a mistake when they respond to dissatisfaction by pointing only towards aggregate improvement, because voters are not simply asking whether conditions are better than before. They are asking whether their society distributes opportunity fairly and whether they are catching up to the standard they believe should be normal.
German reunification created an unusually powerful reference point because citizens in the east were promised convergence with the west after 1990. The enormous economic transformation that followed genuinely raised living standards, rebuilt infrastructure and integrated the former German Democratic Republic into one of the world’s richest economies. Yet convergence has remained incomplete, and the process itself imposed extraordinary social costs. Entire industries collapsed after reunification, firms were privatised or closed, unemployment surged, and millions of younger and better-qualified eastern Germans moved westwards in search of opportunity. Between 1990 and 2022, the population of western Germany increased by roughly 10%, while the eastern population excluding Berlin declined by around 15%. Demography therefore became a political memory embedded in geography: villages lost young people, schools closed, doctors became harder to replace and communities watched economic activity migrate elsewhere.
This is why regional decline cannot be understood entirely through GDP. Population loss changes the social return to place. A town can experience rising productivity per worker while becoming less attractive to live in because the hospital has fewer specialists, the school struggles to recruit teachers and young adults leave for Leipzig, Hamburg, Frankfurt or Munich. The remaining population then ages faster, reducing local demand and increasing the fiscal cost of public services. More young people leave because opportunities deteriorate further. A self-reinforcing equilibrium develops in which demographic decline produces weaker services and weaker services produce additional demographic decline. Economic statistics showing rising income among those who remain do not capture the loss of institutions that once made the community feel viable.
This helps explain why political pessimism can coexist with statistical convergence. Citizens evaluate development through observable local systems rather than national spreadsheets. Is the train running? Can I see a doctor? Are there apprenticeships for my children? Does the town centre contain shops or empty buildings? Do graduates return after university? These are indicators of whether a place appears to possess a future. When the answer is increasingly no, national growth figures have weak persuasive power. Political parties able to convert that decline into a narrative of abandonment therefore possess a ready constituency.
The AfD has done exactly that. It presents eastern Germany as a region ignored or lectured by political elites in Berlin, economically disadvantaged despite three decades of reunification and culturally threatened by immigration and progressive social change. The narrative connects several grievances that might otherwise remain separate: lower wages become evidence of economic neglect; demographic decline becomes evidence that conventional policy failed; immigration becomes evidence that government prioritises newcomers while local services deteriorate; climate policy becomes evidence that urban elites impose costs on rural workers; support for Ukraine becomes evidence that Berlin spends resources abroad while ignoring problems at home. The power lies not in proving that one cause explains everything but in giving many frustrations one political direction.
This is what successful populist parties do particularly well. Complex societies generate hundreds of unrelated problems. Mainstream governments explain them through technical categories: fiscal federalism, labour-market constraints, demographic ageing, asylum law, energy transition, regional productivity and EU regulation. Populists simplify them into a theory of representation: the people have problems because the political class no longer represents them. That theory is attractive because it transforms impersonal structural forces into identifiable agents. If the problem is demographic ageing, no politician can reverse it quickly. If the problem is a corrupt or disconnected establishment, changing politicians appears capable of changing everything.
The AfD’s success therefore cannot be reduced only to economic disadvantage. Immigration appears to be one of the most important issues for voters in both Saxony and Thuringia despite the fact that foreigners make up a substantially smaller share of the population in eastern Germany than in western Germany. Reuters reported that foreigners accounted for about 7.9% of the eastern population, less than half the western share, while immigration was still identified as a leading concern in polling ahead of today’s elections. This is important because political salience does not depend linearly on direct exposure. People can become highly concerned about an issue through national media, anticipated future change, symbolic politics or the belief that limited local resources are being distributed unfairly.
The Solingen knife attack eight days ago intensified that concern nationally. A Syrian asylum seeker suspected of links to Islamic State was accused of killing three people and injuring eight at a festival. Chancellor Olaf Scholz subsequently promised tougher deportation measures, particularly after it emerged that the suspect had previously been scheduled for transfer to Bulgaria under European asylum rules but the transfer did not occur. The attack did not create AfD support from nothing, and polling suggested much of the eastern electorate had formed preferences before it. It nevertheless reinforced one of the party’s strongest arguments: that the state possesses immigration laws it is not capable of enforcing effectively.
This is where immigration politics becomes a question of state capacity rather than simply ideological openness. A government can favour asylum rights and legal immigration while still needing credible systems capable of identifying applicants, processing claims quickly, removing people whose claims fail and integrating those permitted to remain. When administrative systems move slowly or deportation orders are not executed, both humanitarian and restrictionist objectives suffer. Genuine refugees spend years in uncertainty while public confidence declines because rules appear unenforceable. The political space then polarises between people demanding fewer restrictions and people demanding much harsher ones, even though part of the underlying failure is administrative rather than ideological.
The Solingen case therefore gives the AfD an especially effective argument because it converts an abstract migration debate into a rule-enforcement failure. The suspect was not simply someone whom critics believe should never have entered Germany. He was reportedly someone the state had already decided should be transferred under existing rules but failed to remove when he could not be found at his accommodation. Voters can therefore conclude that changing the law is meaningless if government cannot implement the law it already possesses.
This is one reason mainstream parties risk responding incorrectly if they interpret every AfD vote as evidence that millions of citizens have embraced extremist ideology completely. Some voters undoubtedly support nationalist or anti-immigrant positions far beyond the mainstream. Others may be using the AfD as an instrument to punish parties they believe have stopped responding to migration, energy prices, public services or eastern regional inequality. A protest vote and an ideological vote produce the same mark on the ballot but imply different strategies for winning the voter back.
If mainstream parties assume every AfD voter is irretrievable, they leave the party’s coalition intact. If they assume every voter is merely protesting and ignore the movement’s ideological core, they underestimate its durability. The correct response requires disaggregating the electorate: which voters are primarily concerned about immigration, which about economic insecurity, which about distrust in institutions, which about Russia and Ukraine, and which genuinely support ethnonationalist politics? Political strategy becomes much stronger when categories replace moral generalisation.
The rise of the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, makes this fragmentation particularly interesting. The party is economically left-wing in several respects while being sceptical of immigration, highly critical of Germany’s support for Ukraine and hostile to parts of progressive cultural politics. It appears to have won around 14–15% in Thuringia only months after being created, placing it ahead of every party in Scholz’s federal coalition in the state. BSW demonstrates that the political demand destabilising Germany is not simply a uniform movement to the conventional right. Many eastern voters combine preferences that older party systems distribute awkwardly: stronger welfare, restrictive migration, scepticism about military support for Ukraine and cultural conservatism.
This is evidence that the traditional left-right axis is losing explanatory power. An industrial worker can favour redistribution and stronger pensions while opposing immigration. A voter can distrust corporations and also reject progressive cultural politics. A citizen can support state intervention economically while preferring closer relations with Russia. Germany’s established parties bundle these issues into packages that increasingly fail to match some voters’ preference combinations. The Greens combine progressive social values, climate policy and strong support for Ukraine. The FDP combines economic liberalism with socially liberal positions. The AfD combines nationalism with increasingly interventionist promises in some areas. BSW assembles another combination entirely.
Political entrepreneurs gain when established parties leave an unoccupied ideological quadrant. Wagenknecht identified one in eastern Germany: voters economically sceptical of markets but culturally conservative and opposed to the foreign-policy consensus. The rapid growth of BSW suggests that enough citizens occupy this space for it to become institutionally important. This makes coalition formation much harder because parties that agree on economic policy can disagree fundamentally over Russia or immigration, while parties agreeing on foreign policy can clash over welfare and climate.
Today’s election therefore may create a paradox in which the AfD wins the most votes but remains unable to govern because all other parties maintain a firewall, or Brandmauer, refusing coalition cooperation. Procedurally, that is entirely democratic. Parliamentary systems do not automatically give government to the largest party; they give government to whoever can assemble a legislative majority. If the CDU, BSW, SPD or other parties can construct one, they possess the same democratic right to govern as any other parliamentary coalition.
Yet the same cordon-sanitaire paradox seen in France applies here. Excluding the AfD may protect institutions from a party that other politicians consider extremist, particularly given concerns around Höcke and the Thuringian branch. At the same time, if the party repeatedly finishes first while everyone else cooperates to prevent it governing, supporters receive evidence for the AfD’s claim that mainstream politics is one establishment bloc whose deepest agreement is excluding them.
This does not imply the firewall should automatically collapse. Germany possesses historically specific reasons for treating extremist movements with unusual caution. The country’s post-war constitutional order was deliberately designed as a “militant democracy”, meaning democratic institutions are permitted to defend themselves against organisations seeking to use democratic freedoms to destroy the democratic order itself. Germany bans Nazi symbols, allows extremist parties to be monitored by domestic intelligence and gives constitutional institutions powers that some other democracies would consider unusually interventionist. These mechanisms reflect the lesson drawn from the collapse of the Weimar Republic: democracy does not necessarily survive by remaining neutral towards actors seeking to dismantle it.
The difficulty is deciding when defensive democracy becomes defensive elitism. If institutions categorise a party as extremist, the evidence must be specific and legal procedures credible. Otherwise voters may interpret state scrutiny as a mechanism for protecting incumbent parties. Höcke’s record gives critics substantial material: he has been convicted twice this year for knowingly using the banned Nazi-era slogan “Everything for Germany”, while his faction has been associated with some of the AfD’s most radical nationalist rhetoric. The institutional response should therefore focus on actual conduct and constitutional standards rather than the simpler argument that any popular anti-establishment movement must be isolated because mainstream politicians dislike it.
The strongest defence against the AfD ultimately remains political competition rather than administrative exclusion. Germany can prohibit illegal conduct, monitor credible extremist threats and preserve constitutional red lines. Those tools cannot explain to a voter in Gera why their wage remains below western levels, why their children moved away or why the local hospital struggles to recruit staff. If conventional parties cannot answer those questions materially, every institutional action against the AfD risks treating the symptom while the political demand continues expanding.
Eastern Germany’s demographic decline is particularly important because the AfD’s own anti-immigration programme can worsen one of the economic problems feeding its support. The region already faces labour shortages and ageing. Economists cited by Reuters warned that a strong AfD presence could deter foreign workers precisely where employers need additional labour. This creates a populist policy paradox: the political response to perceived regional decline may reduce one of the inputs required to reverse regional decline.
Suppose an eastern state needs doctors, engineers, care workers and skilled manufacturing employees while its working-age population shrinks. There are only several broad ways to increase labour supply: raise domestic participation, encourage people from western Germany to move east, increase birth rates and wait decades, automate more production or attract migrants. The AfD emphasises domestic training and higher birth rates. Those policies may contribute, but demographic arithmetic makes rapid replacement through fertility impossible because children born today do not become surgeons or engineers for two decades.
Immigration therefore can be economically necessary even where it is politically unpopular. The policy challenge becomes making it administratively controlled and socially sustainable, not pretending governments can choose between unlimited immigration and no immigration without economic consequences. A state capable of selecting migrants according to labour needs, processing asylum efficiently and enforcing rules credibly has a stronger chance of maintaining public consent than one oscillating between moral abstraction and emergency restrictions.
This is another area where state capacity can depolarise politics. Efficient institutions reduce the gap between what governments promise and what citizens observe. If voters believe immigration rules actually function, disagreement can focus on how many people should enter rather than whether the state has any control at all. When rules appear unenforced, the debate becomes existential because every future policy promise lacks credibility.
Climate policy produces a similar regional distribution problem. Eastern Germany is more rural, and Reuters reported that more than 10% of its workforce is active in agriculture and forestry compared with roughly 1.2% nationally. Policies designed around decarbonisation can therefore be experienced differently across regions. A metropolitan professional may experience renewable investment through technology jobs and cleaner transport. A farmer may experience climate regulation through higher compliance costs, fuel policy or restrictions on land use. National environmental benefits are diffuse; adjustment costs can be intensely local.
This is the geography of transition. Climate change requires structural economic adjustment, but transitions create winners and losers before aggregate benefits appear. Governments that fail to compensate or involve the losing regions create political markets for parties promising to reverse the entire transition. The economically optimal climate policy therefore is not necessarily the one reducing emissions at lowest technical cost. It may be the one reducing emissions at the lowest politically sustainable social cost.
Germany’s coalition government has struggled precisely because different parties represent competing versions of that transition. The Greens emphasise faster decarbonisation, the FDP emphasises fiscal restraint and market incentives, while Scholz’s SPD attempts to protect industrial employment and welfare. The resulting disputes have made the government appear indecisive even when disagreement reflects genuine trade-offs. Today’s eastern results punish all three governing parties severely. In Thuringia, projections place the SPD at only around 6–7%, the Greens below the parliamentary threshold and the FDP close to political disappearance.
This is a devastating performance signal for Scholz even though state elections do not determine the federal government directly. Regional elections operate as midterm referendums because voters can punish national governments at lower stakes. Germany now faces a federal election next year, and today’s results suggest the governing coalition’s problem is not confined to one unpopular policy. It increasingly lacks persuasive representation across entire regions.
The CDU faces its own strategic dilemma. It can respond by moving towards tougher migration policy in an attempt to recover AfD voters, or maintain clearer ideological distance and compete through competence. Moving right risks normalising AfD framing and losing moderate voters. Refusing to engage migration concerns risks leaving the AfD with an issue monopoly. The optimal strategy probably lies in distinguishing policy convergence from ideological convergence. A centre-right party can support tighter asylum enforcement or controlled immigration without adopting ethnonationalist assumptions about citizenship.
This distinction is essential if democratic systems want to absorb legitimate concerns without allowing radical parties to define the terms of debate. Mainstream politicians often fear that discussing an issue legitimises extremists. The opposite can happen: refusing to discuss it allows extremists to become the only politicians perceived as honest about it.
Denmark again offers one model, where centre-left governments adopted substantially stricter migration policy while preserving a social-democratic economic programme. Whether that approach is normatively desirable is debatable. Politically, it demonstrates that migration preferences are not owned permanently by one ideological family.
Ukraine policy creates a harder divide because both AfD and BSW oppose or question substantial German military support for Kyiv. Eastern Germans historically possess different relationships with Russia from many western constituencies, shaped partly by the GDR’s Soviet history and the enormous transformation after the Cold War. Some voters view sanctions and weapons transfers as prolonging conflict or harming German economic interests rather than protecting European security.
The federal government’s counterargument is that allowing Russia to alter borders by force would create a much more dangerous Europe and ultimately impose larger security costs on Germany. This is a time-horizon disagreement. Cutting aid to Ukraine might reduce some immediate fiscal or economic costs. If it increases the probability of Russian military success and future instability, long-term costs could rise.
Foreign policy is therefore entering German domestic distribution politics. Weapons for Ukraine are no longer viewed only through strategic doctrine; voters compare them with spending on pensions, infrastructure and schools. Populist parties convert that comparison into a simple opportunity-cost narrative: why finance another country’s war while German communities struggle?
Governments need to answer that question rather than dismiss it. The argument for Ukraine assistance must connect external security to domestic welfare. If Russian aggression makes European defence spending permanently higher, threatens neighbouring states or destabilises energy and trade, Ukraine support becomes preventive expenditure rather than charity.
The economic analogy is insurance. Insurance premiums appear wasteful during years when nothing happens. Their value appears only through the catastrophe they prevent. Security expenditure suffers the same political problem because successful deterrence produces an invisible outcome: the war that did not reach you.
Germany’s political difficulty is that eastern voters often feel they already paid substantial costs for other national projects without receiving equal returns. Reunification, migration, climate transition and sanctions can therefore accumulate psychologically into one perception that large national decisions are made elsewhere and costs arrive locally.
This is a representation deficit rather than merely an income deficit.
People can accept painful policies more easily when they believe they participated meaningfully in choosing them. The same material cost becomes more politically toxic when experienced as something imposed by distant institutions.
Federalism is supposed to reduce this problem by giving regions political authority. Yet eastern Germany’s relatively small population means national politics remains dominated numerically by western states. The demographic decline itself therefore reduces political weight further. A region loses people because opportunities are weaker; losing people reduces representation and economic scale; reduced influence reinforces the perception of abandonment.
That is another self-reinforcing cycle.
Reversing it requires making eastern regions places people want to move towards rather than merely places government subsidises to prevent further decline.
This is where policy should focus on agglomeration and institutional quality, not simply transfers. Universities, research institutes, advanced manufacturing clusters, transport links and reliable public services create reasons for young people to stay or return. Some eastern cities such as Leipzig and Dresden have already demonstrated that this is possible. The objective should be creating additional centres capable of attracting people rather than promising that every shrinking town can retain exactly the economic structure it possessed thirty years ago.
Regional policy needs honesty about creative destruction and place-based compensation. Not every industry should be preserved permanently. Not every settlement can avoid demographic change. Governments still have obligations to ensure citizens in declining regions retain healthcare, transport, digital connectivity and opportunities for retraining. Otherwise market adjustment becomes geographic abandonment.
The AfD benefits when national elites appear to say that those who cannot adapt should simply move.
Mobility can increase economic efficiency.
It can destroy communities.
Economics needs to account for both.
The emotional value of place is not easily represented in GDP, but political systems encounter it through votes.
This may be one reason the phrase “left behind” is simultaneously overused and analytically useful. It can become vague enough to describe almost any dissatisfied voter. In eastern Germany, however, it corresponds to measurable demographic and wealth disparities combined with a powerful historical expectation that reunification would eventually eliminate them.
The key word is eventually.
Thirty-four years is long enough for a generation to conclude that permanent transition has become permanent inequality.
Western politicians can reasonably point towards enormous convergence.
Eastern voters can reasonably ask why convergence remains unfinished.
Those positions are not contradictory.
The political question is what happens when improvement fails to satisfy expectations.
This week’s result gives one answer.
Voters search for actors promising not merely better policy but recognition of the grievance itself.
Populism often begins with recognition before policy.
A politician says: you are right that something has been taken from you; you are right that elites do not understand; you are right that the system treats you unfairly.
Only afterwards comes the programme.
Mainstream parties frequently respond in the opposite order, producing spreadsheets before demonstrating recognition.
That is a communication failure, but it can become a policy failure when leaders interpret voter anger as irrational rather than information.
The correct response is not agreeing with every diagnosis offered by AfD voters.
It is identifying the underlying signals honestly.
Eastern wages remain lower.
Wealth remains dramatically lower.
Population decline has weakened communities.
Immigration administration contains failures.
Climate policy creates regional adjustment costs.
Germany’s government is unpopular.
These are real.
Claims that foreigners or democratic institutions are responsible for every problem are not therefore automatically real.
Good politics separates valid grievance from invalid causation.
That is harder than condemning the entire movement and harder than accepting its explanation wholesale.
It is also the only durable way to compete with it.
Germany’s history inevitably gives today’s result particular symbolic weight. Any far-right electoral breakthrough invokes memories of the country’s twentieth century. Those memories should create vigilance, especially around rhetoric challenging equal citizenship or democratic institutions.
History should not become a substitute for contemporary analysis.
The AfD is not the Nazi Party, and Germany in 2024 is not Weimar Germany. Its constitution, courts, federal system, European integration, civil society and political culture are profoundly different. Treating every far-right advance as evidence that 1933 is repeating can weaken historical understanding rather than strengthen it.
The useful historical lesson is more institutional.
Democracy should neither assume that extremist movements disappear if ignored nor assume that banning or excluding them solves the political demand behind them.
Strong democracies need both constitutional defence and competitive performance.
Germany possesses unusually strong tools for the first.
Today’s vote suggests it needs much better performance on the second.
If the AfD remains outside government but continues growing, the firewall becomes harder to maintain.
If it enters government eventually, German institutions will need to be strong enough that electoral victory does not provide unrestricted power.
If mainstream parties recover its voters, that recovery will come not because those voters were lectured out of dissatisfaction but because another political coalition provided more credible answers.
The result in Thuringia therefore is significant not simply because a far-right party finished first.
It is significant because it reveals a gap between economic convergence and political convergence that reunification has not closed.
Germany succeeded enormously at integrating territory, currencies, infrastructure and institutions.
Integrating political experience has proved harder.
A state can equalise roads faster than memories.
It can raise wages faster than accumulated wealth.
It can transfer fiscal resources faster than it can create the feeling that citizens possess equal influence and equal prospects.
Those slower forms of convergence now matter politically.
The AfD has converted them into votes.
The rest of Germany’s political system faces a choice about how to respond.
It can treat today’s result primarily as evidence that eastern voters have become dangerously radicalised.
Or it can treat it as evidence that radical politics has become capable of organising real economic, demographic and cultural grievances more effectively than mainstream institutions have.
The first diagnosis may justify a stronger firewall.
The second requires stronger government.
Germany may need both.
What it cannot assume is that objective progress will eventually make dissatisfaction disappear by itself.
People do not vote according to a national balance sheet.
They vote according to whether they believe their lives, communities and identities possess a future inside the system producing that balance sheet.
In Thuringia today, roughly one-third of voters chose a party promising to challenge that system fundamentally.
The statistic Germany should worry about most is therefore not simply 33% for the AfD.
It is the number of citizens who looked at three decades of measurable improvement and still concluded that the political order responsible for it does not represent them.
