For the second time in two weeks, the Alternative for Germany won a German state election — but winning did not necessarily mean governing, and that distinction is becoming more important than the victories themselves.
Two weeks earlier, the AfD had taken 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt. One result could be treated as an electoral earthquake. Two begin to look like a political condition.
Yet, the AfD is still unlikely to govern either state. That is the paradox now confronting Germany. The country has developed an effective mechanism for preventing the AfD from converting electoral victories into executive power. What it has not developed is an equally effective mechanism for preventing the party from winning those elections.
The Second Victory Changes the Question
After Saxony-Anhalt, it was still possible to explain 43.8 percent as an exceptional result in an exceptional state. Eastern frustration, economic stagnation, migration, energy, Ukraine, Russia and the long memory of reunification all offered plausible explanations.
Those arguments have already been made.
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania changes the question. The AfD did not need another 43.8 percent to prove that Saxony-Anhalt was not an isolated eruption. It needed another victory. It got one.
Perhaps the most extraordinary number, however, was not 38.2 but 4.9.
That was the CDU.
The party of Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel, today led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, failed to cross the threshold for entry into a German state parliament for the first time in its history. The party it has spent years promising never to govern with received almost eight times as many votes.
The firewall held. The people standing behind it were disappearing.
The story is therefore no longer simply about the rise of the AfD. It is about what happens to the political system built to contain it.
The Firewall Works. That Is the Problem
It is tempting to say the firewall has failed. In its narrowest sense, it has not. The AfD has become one of Germany’s largest political forces and has now won consecutive state elections with results approaching 40 percent. It still has no minister-president.
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the arithmetic is straightforward. The AfD has 32 of 71 seats, the SPD 29, while Die Linke and the Greens hold five each. Together, the latter three control 39 seats, enough to form a majority without the election winner.
There is nothing unconstitutional about this. Germany is a parliamentary democracy and governments are formed by parliamentary majorities.
But legality is the least interesting part of the story.
When a party can finish first and still find every viable coalition constructed without it, the firewall stops being merely a boundary. It becomes an organising principle of government.
The AfD can tell its voters that it won, and the others combined to keep it out. Its opponents can answer that a democratic parliamentary majority exists without it. Both statements are true.
For AfD voters, however, the pattern is increasingly easy to describe: win the election, then watch the other parties negotiate a majority designed to exclude you.
The Brandmauer no longer merely determines who refuses to govern with the AfD. It increasingly determines who everyone else must govern with.
Power Without Office
Government office is only one form of political power. A party can remain excluded from ministries while still reorganising the political system around itself.
With 32 seats in Schwerin, the AfD has enough deputies to trigger investigative committees on its own. Its more important influence, however, is political.
When the CDU adjusts its language because it is losing voters to the AfD, the AfD has exerted influence. When coalition arithmetic begins with the question of how to construct a majority without the largest party, it has exerted influence again. The same is true when every regional election becomes another argument over whether the Brandmauer can survive.
The party does not necessarily need to tear down the firewall. It can continue growing behind it.
The larger the AfD becomes, the broader the coalition potentially required to exclude it, and the greater the ideological distance such a coalition may have to contain. That can make it harder for those parties to offer voters a coherent political alternative to the party they were assembled to keep out.
There is nothing undemocratic about the firewall. The problem is simpler: electoral arithmetic does not care about the intentions behind it.
The Brandmauer may keep the AfD out of government. It does not keep the AfD from determining the arithmetic of government.
That is power without office.
Two Victories, Two Different Problems
Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania now present Germany with two versions of the same dilemma.
In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD won 43.8 percent and 39 of 83 seats, coming three seats short of an outright majority. There, the question is mathematical: what happens to the firewall if the excluded party eventually becomes large enough that it no longer needs anyone on the other side of it?
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania presents almost the opposite problem. There is a clear parliamentary majority without the AfD, which makes the firewall easier to maintain. But the political price is harder to overlook.
The AfD is the largest force in parliament. The Chancellor’s CDU is no longer there at all. And the parties now negotiating a possible government all finished behind the election winner.
Again, this is constitutionally legitimate. But constitutional legitimacy and political normality are not the same thing.
Germany has not suspended democracy to contain the AfD. It has discovered something more uncomfortable: democratic procedure allows the political establishment to govern around an election winner, provided enough of its opponents can still agree on one thing.
Increasingly, that one thing is the AfD.
The Firewall Is Stronger Than the Consensus Behind It
The Brandmauer is often discussed as though the boundary drawn by Germany’s established parties were equally fixed in the electorate. The polling suggests otherwise.
Before the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania election, an NDR survey found that 62 percent of respondents considered it acceptable for other parties to introduce motions jointly with the AfD or pass measures using AfD votes. Almost half considered AfD participation in a state government acceptable, although a majority still rejected an AfD minister-president.
Voters appear more willing than the party system to distinguish between different forms of cooperation.
None of this means the firewall is about to collapse. But it does suggest that a firm consensus among Germany’s established parties is no longer mirrored by an equally firm consensus among voters.
For Friedrich Merz, that gap is becoming increasingly awkward. The Chancellor can continue promising that the CDU will never govern with the AfD. The more immediate challenge is ensuring that there is still a CDU left in the parliament from which to make that promise.
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, there was not.
The CDU received 4.9 percent. Merz’s own approval rating subsequently stood at just 11 percent, and the Chancellor called the result a “disaster.”
For once, the description required little embellishment.
Preventing the AfD from governing is not the same thing as defeating it politically. The first can be achieved through coalition discipline. The second requires voters to choose somebody else.
At 4.9 percent, the CDU’s strategy begins to look less like defeating a rival than managing defeat.
The Brandmauer may protect the CDU from governing with the AfD. It does not protect the CDU from losing to it.
And a firewall is not a political programme. It cannot lower energy costs, revive an industrial region, improve infrastructure or settle arguments over migration. Germany’s established parties increasingly risk defining political success by whether the AfD remains outside government rather than by whether they themselves are recovering electoral support.
A coalition can be formed successfully while the political centre continues shrinking beneath it.
Germany Changes Even Without an AfD Government
For Germany’s neighbours, this is more than a domestic coalition puzzle. Germany remains Europe’s largest economy and one of the principal states shaping EU policy. Its decisions affect industrial policy, energy, sanctions, defence, migration and relations with Russia and Ukraine.
Focusing exclusively on whether the AfD itself enters government risks missing the larger transformation.
German policy can shift without a single AfD minister taking office. Mainstream parties respond to electoral pressure. Positions change. Coalitions adapt. Issues once considered politically settled return to debate when enough voters punish the parties defending the existing settlement.
The question for Germany’s neighbours is therefore not merely whether the AfD will govern.
It is what Germany looks like when almost everyone else begins governing around the possibility that it might.
When Winning Is Not Enough
For years, the Brandmauer offered German politics a certain simplicity. The AfD could grow, but there was a line it could not cross.
That line still exists. What has changed is everything around it.
In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD won 43.8 percent and came three seats short of a majority. Two weeks later, it won Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with 38.2 percent while the Chancellor’s party disappeared from the Landtag.
The firewall survived both elections.
That should not be confused with the survival of the old political order.
Germany’s established parties can continue excluding the AfD from executive office. What they cannot exclude is the electoral arithmetic produced by millions of voters.
The AfD may eventually enter government. It may remain outside it for years. But the deeper transformation does not depend on either outcome.
The Brandmauer was designed to keep the AfD outside power. Instead, German politics is increasingly being organised around the party it excludes.
A party does not have to govern Germany to change how Germany is governed.
It only has to become large enough that everyone else has to govern around it.
Adrian Korczyński, Independent Analyst & Observer on Central Europe and global policy research
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