The numbers speak for themselves: Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a party that dabbles in Nazi imagery, distinguishes between “biological” and “passport” Germans, and is too extreme even for France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen, nearly doubled its score in Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt to 43.8% of the vote. Meanwhile, the centre-right CDU of the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, collapsed to 17.2%, less than half its total in the same race five years ago, and the centre-left SPD – Germany’s other main party of government for the past 60-odd years – scraped 9.3%. The least that can be said is that the centre did not hold.
It is not yet clear whether the AfD, whose local branch in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt is officially classified by the country’s domestic intelligence service as “confirmed rightwing extremist”, will be able to form a government: it has 39 lawmakers in the 83-member parliament, just short of an outright majority. But the score is the party’s strongest-ever state result and puts it closer to governing a German state than any far-right party since the second world war. It has sent shock waves round Europe, with nationalists cheering a “historic win” that is “just the beginning” and mainstream leaders warning of a “grave moment” for Europe.
Sweden holds legislative elections next weekend. France faces a crunch presidential ballot next spring. Key parliamentary races will follow there, as well as in Italy, Spain and Poland, later in the year.
Far-right parties are polling strongly in all of them, and Europe’s centre fears a continent-wide nationalist wave. It would be wise not to read too much into one election result in one quite particular German state. Saxony-Anhalt, analysts note, is home to barely 1.8 million voters and has long been a far-right stronghold: in federal and state elections over the past decade, support for the AfD there has consistently been double the national average.
It is also ahead – although in a far tighter race, with the SPD – in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where state elections are due later this month, and it is lying second even in liberal Berlin. Its rise is part of a decade-long march by far-right parties across Europe. Almost one in four voters in Europe now cast their ballot for far-right parties, according to research led by Matthijs Rooduijn, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam, a proportion that has grown nearly fivefold since the mid-1990s and climbed particularly steeply over the past three years.
This analysis, by more than 150 political scientists in 31 countries, found that the proportion of Europeans voting for a far-right party in their country’s most recent national elections had risen in 2026 to more than 23%, from about 10% a decade ago and roughly 5% in 1995. Far-right populist parties are now in government as part of ruling coalitions in Croatia, Czechia, Italy and Finland, propping up a rightwing minority government in Sweden, and leading in the polls in Austria, Belgium, France and Germany (and, until very recently, the UK). They have also suffered recent defeats, including in the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders’s Freedom party (PVV) lost nearly a third of its seats to finish second last year, and Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz was comprehensively beaten by his centre-right rival in April.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
