Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski warned that the Alternative for Germany party's electoral gains could turn Berlin’s military buildup into a security risk for Europe, even as Warsaw backs a stronger German army. The far-right party won a record 43.8 percent in Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt election, more than doubling its 2021 result. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union crashed to 17.2 percent, its worst-ever result in the eastern state.
For Warsaw, the prospect of a far-right party gaining power in a heavily militarized Germany hits a deep historical nerve. Parts of present-day Poland were occupied by Imperial Germany during World War I, and Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, triggering World War II in Europe and subjecting the country to a brutal occupation. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk struck a similarly stark note after the Saxony-Anhalt vote, saying “only idiots or traitors” in Poland could celebrate the AfD’s triumph.
Merz pledged at the beginning of his term in 2025 to turn the Bundeswehr into “the strongest conventional army in Europe.” Germany also spent $114 billion on its military last year — almost as much as France and Poland combined — and Berlin is planning further increases. As part of that wider rearmament drive, Germany is also planning for nearly €12 billion in long-range weapons capable of striking military targets hundreds or thousands of kilometers away, part of Berlin’s effort to deter Russia in the war against Ukraine. Today, the AfD is pushing a much softer line on Moscow: Its Bundestag caucus has called for German weapons deliveries to Ukraine to stop and for sanctions on Russia to be rolled back as part of peace talks.
The far-right party remains in opposition at the federal level, where Germany’s mainstream parties refuse to work with it, adhering for now to an electoral 'firewall' against governing with far-right parties — a safeguard designed to prevent a repeat of the events that saw Adolf Hitler's Nazi party take power in the 1930s. Hans von der Burchard contributed to this report.
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