What links the thuggish masked agitation in southern England this weekend and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) best-ever result in a German state – where it more than doubled the 21% vote it received five years ago? Several hundred men in balaclavas blocking an A road are not the same as a party winning a landslide election. But both events draw on the idea that the political system has lost control.
The extremists in Dover and Portsmouth dramatise this claim; the electoral result in Germany threatens to institutionalise it. The prospect of Germany’s first far-right-led state government since the second world war carries real consequences. In Saxony-Anhalt it could see power handed to a party hostile to migrants, Islam, LGBTQ+ rights and climate policy.
Alarmingly, it has senior figures linked to former neo-Nazi groups. About 170,000 foreign nationals live among 2 million people in Saxony-Anhalt – and roughly a fifth of the state’s doctors were born abroad. The grim paradox is that an AfD government could oversee the very state intelligence service that has classified the party as “rightwing extremist”.
In England, the “Patriot Platform” agitation is far-right vigilantism that claims it will “stop the boats” if the authorities won’t. The AfD is a political party which presents its success as a repudiation of established parties that, it claims, have failed – most notably on immigration. The intimidation seen in England and the AfD’s extremism are, however, two sides of the same coin: a broader politics in which migration is felt to embody a sense of powerlessness – not just over borders but over state institutions, economic change and national identity.
The AfD polls highest in Germany’s eastern states. These have a post-reunification history of population loss and high unemployment. Britain has its own political geography and history.
The small boats are a live political issue. More than 33,000 people arrived by that route in the year to June 2026. Nearly all will claim asylum.
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