Why the world should care about the far right’s rise in Germany

The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party won 43.8 percent of the popular vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt on September 6, trouncing the governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

That victory brought a party which follows in the historical footsteps of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party closer than it has ever come since World War II to ruling a German state.

Two weeks later, the AfD took more than 38 percent of the vote in a regional election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the Christian Democrats failed to cross the 5 percent threshold to enter the regional parliament – “a disaster”, said Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

“What it’s doing is what the far right has done elsewhere, and that is essentially erode the consensus against a set of mainstream political parties… hollowing out of the centre,” Catherine Fieschi, a political scientist with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on the European far right, told Al Jazeera.

The left-wing Die Linke party took 25.3 percent of the vote in a separate by-election in Berlin on Sunday, illustrating how German voters are being pulled by both ends of the political spectrum.

Here’s why the far right’s rise in Germany matters to the rest of the world:

Could the far right derail German foreign policy?

Fieschi expects immediate effects on German policy towards Ukraine, which relies heavily on German financial and military industrial might.

“This is bad news for Merz. It’s bad news for Germany, and it’s bad news for the Franco-German engine, and therefore for Ukraine,” Fieschi said.

Germany’s AfD wants dialogue with Russia.

On Tuesday, as Merz’s future looked uncertain, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov lauded the AfD as a popular political force talking about “establishing relations” with Russia. “This can’t fail to appeal to us,” he said.

Ronald Meinardus, research fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), explained how the AfD has adopted Russian positions.

“The AfD repeatedly says they want to stop all military and financial support to Ukraine, to refuse Ukraine entry into the EU and NATO, to restore relations with Russia and restart Nord Stream.”

Europe boycotted Russian oil in 2023 in retaliation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and will stop importing Russian gas by the end of 2027.

On Monday, Moscow reinforced the argument that dependence on Russian gas is good for Germany.

“The decline in the competitiveness of the German economy is largely due to Germany’s decision to stop buying cheap Russian gas and instead purchase much more expensive gas from other countries, primarily the United States, at times paying several times more on the spot market,” Peskov said.

What about the economy?

There was unexpected good news for the German economy on the same day, when the country’s leading business newspaper, Handelsblatt, reported a growth forecast of 1.3 percent for 2026 – double what was previously expected.

The inward-looking AfD wants to prioritise spending for Germans, and is against foreign aid in any form.

Does the AfD have the power to set policy?

It will struggle to govern even the two states where it has a relative majority, since most other parties have ruled out working with it, and a national election is not due until early 2029.

Yet its victories put psychological pressure on the Merz government now, said Fieschi.

“Given that Merz has cancelled all his commitments, not gone to [the United Nations General Assembly in] New York, he’s going to go from crisis meeting to crisis meeting,” she said. “Merz is going to be a less effective chancellor.

“Germany is not going to stop supporting Ukraine, but I do think that it will do so even more by stealth,” said Fieschi. “I can’t see Merz getting on a train and going to Kyiv at this point.”

Oleksandr Danylyuk, an expert in Russian hybrid warfare, is even more pessimistic.

“[Moscow’s] task is to exhaust Ukraine, and to disrupt support from the West to Ukraine, and they have great progress in this regard,” Danylyuk told Al Jazeera.

“So that’s why they are confident that they can win. That’s why they’re not interested in any negotiations or ceasefire whatever, because actually, the political situation in Europe, in the US, is not optimistic at all,” said Danylyuk, who has served as a senior adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister, its foreign intelligence service and its commander-in-chief.

“Europe is going to be divided,” he predicted. “Most probably, it will not have any consensus or even keep financial support to Ukraine on the level it is right now, which is not actually enough anyhow.”

Merz came to power suggesting he might send Ukraine some of the powerful Taurus cruise missiles Germany possesses. That now seems highly unlikely.

Nor is Europe likely to resume discussion of lending Ukraine more than 200 billion euros ($230bn) in immobilised Russian money in the European financial system. That would be a game-changer, financing Ukraine’s war machine for years.

“There’s absolutely no appetite for it,” said Fieschi, citing objections from Belgium, whose depository Euroclear holds the bulk of the funds. “Loads of people are hiding behind the Belgian objection.”

Will the governing coalition hold out?

The mainstream has found ways to adapt to the rise of the AfD, which took 20.8 percent of the national vote in the last general election in February 2025, twice its 2021 showing.

The CDU formed a grand coalition with their traditional ideological opponents, the Social Democrats (SPD), to keep the AfD out of national power.

Fieschi now sees Merz as a wounded animal, limping to the next round of regional elections in April 2027.

“If those elections are as bad as these, then my sense is that we could be seeing a German election in the fall of 2027.”

Could the AfD win power at the national level?

The parliamentary system makes that unlikely, said Meinardus of ELIAMEP.

“It’s very difficult for AfD to take power in the German federal system because you have several states they would have to win, and objectively cannot because they are not equally popular everywhere, and because no one will work with them,” said Meinardus.

Germany also has a powerful judiciary, which would likely challenge any unconstitutional laws the AfD tried to enact.

Protest marches against the AfD across 20 German cities on September 12 served as a reminder that the far-right party remains deeply unpopular and divisive outside its former East German power base.