For years, Germany’s established parties, backed by nearly all of its major media, maintained a “firewall” (Brandmauer) between themselves and the anti-mass-migration party Alternative for Germany (AfD). “The firewall is probably the most important and the most powerful tool of the left parties in Germany,” Pauline Voss, a politics reporter for the German news outlet NIUS, told Public in an interview on Monday. “And strangely, the CDU, the conservative party, adopted and integrated this firewall into their own politics,” despite the two parties’ overlapping agendas.
That firewall began to break down on Sunday, when the AfD won a historic victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. “For the first time it was possible for the AfD to gain power, to be the winner, not only the winner of an election, but maybe in the end to be part of the government,” Voss said.
In 2020, after a Free Democrat politician won the premiership of Thuringia with AfD and CDU votes, Chancellor Angela Merkel called the vote “unforgivable” and said the result “must be reversed.” The winner resigned within two days, and Germany’s Constitutional Court later ruled that Merkel’s demand had violated the AfD’s right to equal competition.
“The voters of the AfD have waited for this for a very long time,” Voss said, and the party “overperformed a little bit, like 1 or 2%.” The party took 43.8% of the vote, more than double the 20.8% it won in 2021, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU fell to 17.2%. The AfD also mobilized roughly 170,000 people who had not voted last time, its largest single source of new support.
