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# Germany’s far-right surge is not just about the East
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/germanys-far-right-surge-is-not-just-about-the-east/
- Published: 2026-09-08T12:55:46.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-08T12:55:46.000Z
- Description: The AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt has roots specific to eastern Germany. But the economic insecurity behind its rise is increasingly visible across the country.
- Author: Dr. Patrick Kaczmarczyk
- Tags: Germany, far right, AfD, Europe

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has just won 43.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt. The conservative Christian Democratic Union, which has governed the state for most of the period since reunification, came a distant second with 17.2 per cent.

For a country still associated abroad with political stability, strong industry and comparatively high living standards, such a result may seem surprising. 

Yet the past few years have left deep marks on the German economy. Real economic output has barely grown, industrial production has weakened, and households have suffered a substantial loss of purchasing power. Indeed, real wages only recently recovered their pre-pandemic level. For an average household of four people, the economic losses relative to the pre-crisis trend amount to €12,000 per year.

It is hardly surprising that these developments have led to shifts in the political mood. At the 2025 federal election, the AfD doubled its national vote share. Its support remains much higher in eastern Germany, but the party also made substantial gains in the west. Meanwhile, the mainstream parties have struggled to offer a convincing response to stagnation, industrial uncertainty and the rising cost of living. The federal government has largely stuck to the familiar language of competitiveness, structural reforms and spending restraint, while cutting civilian spending as military expenditure rises.

This national context heavily shaped the election campaign in Saxony-Anhalt, so the results cannot be understood simply as a verdict on the state government. At the same time, Saxony-Anhalt has its own economic history, and that history helps explain why the political consequences have become so much more pronounced there.

**The peculiarities of Saxony-Anhalt**

When examining economic and political development in eastern Germany, it is impossible to ignore the deep scars left by the market shock therapy of the early 1990s. When East and West Germany entered monetary union in 1990, the parity between the West and East German currencies caused a dramatic overnight loss of competitiveness for eastern industry. Manufacturing collapsed within a few years and millions of jobs disappeared. Young and qualified people left in large numbers. The privatisation of eastern companies also transferred ownership and economic decision-making to western German firms, while many senior positions in business and public institutions were subsequently filled by western Germans.

For a generation, economic transformation therefore became associated with the traumatic experiences of job losses, out-migration and a loss of control over the region’s future. The consequences remain visible today in the demographic structure, in lower wages and in the economic geography of eastern Germany.

This historical background matters because the region is now facing another industrial transformation, which it enters from a structurally weak position. In Saxony-Anhalt, the median monthly wage for a full-time employee is around €3,560 (£3,059), more than €650 below the national median. Unemployment stands at 8.2 per cent, higher than the German average. Economic output fell again in 2025, while important industrial sectors such as chemicals, metals and automotive suppliers remain under pressure.

Households have also lived through several years of sharply rising prices. Inflation has fallen, but food, housing and energy remain considerably more expensive than before the pandemic. Among AfD voters, concerns about paying bills and maintaining their standard of living were widespread.

Economic insecurity is not the only factor explaining support for the AfD. Migration, nationalism, opposition to support for Ukraine and resentment against established political institutions all matter. But these political conflicts unfold against an economic background. Where people expect their living standards to deteriorate and fear that structural change will leave their region worse off, resentment finds more fertile ground.

**A better starting point than 1990**

There is one important difference from the transformation after reunification. Saxony-Anhalt today has, at least in principle, much better conditions to benefit economically from structural change rather than simply absorb its costs. The state produces a large share of its electricity from renewable sources, and eastern Germany has attracted important investments in electric mobility, batteries and renewable energy. Around 60 per cent of the cars manufactured in eastern Germany are already electric.

Leveraging these structural advantages, however, depends on the wider framework of German industrial policy – and this is where the economy in Saxony-Anhalt is getting into trouble. With a strong emotional attachment to market liberal ideas and fiscal austerity (except for the military), German industrial policy turns out erratic and contradictory. Market participants have no orientation in which sectors the German economy will generate demand in the future. There is a high uncertainty over future electricity prices, which are key to the green transformation. Announcements are frequently revised or applied modestly – for example in the case of capped electricity prices for industry – due to market liberal regulations at the European level.

How that concretely affects local livelihoods and business, is vividly illustrated by the automotive sector. 

Volkswagen’s plant in Zwickau, for example, in neighbouring Saxony, was transformed into one of the company’s flagship electric-car factories after years of investment and negotiations with the workforce. Employees were retrained and an initially sceptical workforce was persuaded that the transition could secure the plant’s future.

Now Volkswagen cannot guarantee vehicle production there beyond 2030 and is considering alternative uses. Across the group, jobs are being cut as VW responds to weak demand, overcapacity and stronger competition from Chinese manufacturers. For workers (and their families) who remember the economic collapse of the 1990s, such developments inevitably resonate differently. They raise the question of whether another transformation will once again leave behind fewer jobs, weaker communities and decisions taken elsewhere.

**The eastern problem is becoming a German one**

While the history of reunification is specific to eastern Germany, the economic pressures visible there today increasingly are not. Industrial workers in the Ruhr area, Saarland or Baden-Württemberg are asking similar questions about the future of jobs in cars, steel and chemicals. Households across Germany have experienced a decline in real purchasing power. Municipalities struggle to maintain schools, transport and other basic services. Housing has become expensive in many cities, while Germany’s railways have turned into a daily reminder of deteriorating public infrastructure.

The AfD’s electoral development reflects this shift. Its strongest results are still in the east, but its rise in western Germany has been unmistakable. The regional differences remain substantial. The underlying trend is becoming more national. 

Part of the explanation lies in the exhaustion of Germany’s economic model. For years, German growth rested heavily on exports, cheap energy and strong demand from China. The car industry, machinery producers and chemical companies benefited enormously. The success of this model reduced the pressure for fundamental change.

After the financial crisis, Angela Merkel’s government introduced the constitutional sovereign debt brake. Public investment remained weak while roads, schools, railways and digital infrastructure deteriorated. During the 2024 European football championship, visitors from abroad received a concentrated demonstration of the problem through delayed trains and patchy mobile coverage.

Industrial policy followed a similar pattern. Germany once had a substantial solar manufacturing industry, but much of it disappeared during the 2010s. China, by contrast, built large-scale production capacities and supply chains in solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles.

German carmakers remained highly profitable with combustion-engine vehicles, particularly in China, and adjusted only gradually. They now face Chinese competitors with advantages in batteries, production scale and increasingly the vehicles themselves.

Germany still has many of the assets needed for a new industrial model: skilled workers, engineers, research institutes, industrial infrastructure and large renewable-energy resources. What is missing is a sufficiently coherent strategy to turn those assets into secure employment and rising living standards.

**What needs to change**

Leveraging the potential of the economy and providing more economic security would require significant action on at least two fronts. In the short term, Germany needs stronger domestic demand after years of lost purchasing power and weak growth. Cutting VAT on basic food items or reducing the cost of public transport would provide visible relief to households.

Beyond such immediate relief, the government needs to decide what kind of industrial economy it wants Germany to have in ten or twenty years. That requires sustained investment in electricity grids, transport, education and renewable energy, combined with a clearer strategy for sectors such as steel, chemicals, batteries and electric mobility. Where strategically important production cannot be secured through private investment alone, public equity stakes or public ownership should be available. Above considerations apply in disproportionate urgency for regions undergoing structural change.

The first response from Berlin after the election, however, gives little reason to expect such a change in direction. Chancellor Friedrich Merz acknowledged the scale of the CDU’s defeat in Saxony-Anhalt, but reaffirmed his government’s economic reform programme, which the majority of Germans oppose, as it will increase hardship and costs on the population. His conclusion was that these reforms needed to be explained better and communicated in a way that reached voters more emotionally.

Merz’s response suggests that Berlin has drawn a very different lesson from the result. After years of stagnation, industrial uncertainty and pressure on household incomes, much of the political establishment still treats the economic strategy as broadly sound and the main problem as one of communication. Saxony-Anhalt should give pause to that assumption.

The state may have a specific history that cannot simply be projected onto western Germany, but several of the forces at play there – insecurity about industrial jobs, high living costs, deteriorating public services and declining confidence that politics can shape economic change – are equally visible elsewhere.

Democratic parties will not contain the AfD through appeals to defend democratic institutions alone. They also have to demonstrate that those institutions can provide economic security, functioning public services and a credible industrial future. Saxony-Anhalt shows what can happen when confidence in that promise erodes for too long.

*Dr Patrick Kaczmarczyk is a researcher at the Centre of Excellence for Transformation of the University of Mannheim, Germany. He is a consultant at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).*