The AfD Wins With Moscow’s Words, Reaches for Power in Saxony-Anhalt and Files Charges Against Chancellor Merz

A sentence does not need a passport. Last week, Vladimir Putin stood before the press and said Friedrich Merz had lost the trust of his own citizens. The chancellor was giving away the country’s national interests instead of defending them, the Russian president said, as relations between Moscow and Berlin are at their lowest point since the Cold War. A few days later, a party won overwhelmingly in Saxony-Anhalt that has been making exactly that accusation for years.

The AfD now stands on the verge of becoming the first party since World War II to take over a German state government, even though its state branch in Saxony-Anhalt is officially classified as confirmed right-wing extremist. Nationwide, the party is also listed by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency as a suspected right-wing extremist organization, while several other state branches are already classified as confirmed right-wing extremist. In nationwide polls, the AfD is now in first place.

During the campaign, leading politicians in the party accused the chancellor of ignoring people’s concerns at home in order to send weapons to Ukraine and spend heavily on defense. The sanctions were hurting Germany more than Russia, they said, and the country needed to start buying cheap Russian gas again. Western politicians were to blame for the war. The Kremlin has been spreading the same lines for years, publicly and through its propaganda, in an effort to tear apart Western unity. Representatives of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement repeat them too, as does the European right.

The Kremlin provides the playbook that right-wing populist forces and the MAGA movement also use. Russia did not create the crisis of liberal democracy, it is not powerful enough for that, but it takes advantage of the opportunity and pours fuel on it. The election came at a tense moment. Just days earlier, German authorities had blamed Russia for unexploded explosive drones found at Leipzig Airport. Germany then shut down Russian facilities, and Moscow immediately responded in kind. AfD supporters in Saxony-Anhalt were hardly troubled by any of it.

The rise is being driven by anger over economic stagnation and a decade of large-scale immigration. In the former East Germany, there is also a certain fondness for Russia, and the language used for it sounds much like Putin’s. Many people here believe the country’s problems would disappear if Germany simply decided to be friends with Russia again. Ulrich K., 83, from Magdeburg says he is not afraid of Russia and believes Germany should take care of itself. Ekkehard E., 62, a heating specialist who can no longer work because of a disability, says money is being spent in Ukraine that is missing at home while his social benefits are being cut.

Most Germans still look east with concern. Around 56 percent said in a poll last week that they supported rebuilding the armed forces. Support is lower in the east, where memories of the old system’s order still linger. Among AfD voters in Saxony-Anhalt, only 31 percent described Russia as a threat, according to post-election polling.

Merz himself read the result with an eye toward the east. Some 2,500 kilometers away, there was particular joy over the outcome, the chancellor said, and that was hardly surprising when you looked at who had tried to encourage it and help bring it about. Putin knows his counterpart. He speaks German and was stationed in East Germany as a KGB lieutenant colonel. He has an ear for the divisive lines that gain traction in the West; Germany is not his first target. Before Trump’s rise, he sent culture-war messages aimed at conservative Americans, and back in 2013, columnist Pat Buchanan, whose politics helped pave the way for Trump, asked in a column whether Putin was one of us. During the 2016 campaign, Russia had the Democratic National Committee’s emails stolen and published to help Trump. At the same time, influence campaigns were underway that were meant to accelerate the rise of the right in Germany and France.

Since the war against Ukraine, experts say, Putin has been betting that his authoritarian system will outlast the fickle democracies backing Kyiv. Speaking about the West on Russian television in 2024, he said people there had spent centuries stuffing their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money, but that the vampires’ ball was coming to an end. Not all of this is Moscow’s doing. After the invasion, around 1.3 million Ukrainians sought refuge in Germany, on top of 1 million people who had earlier arrived from devastated Syria. The war pushed energy prices higher and led Berlin to reject Russian oil and gas, putting additional strain on the economy. As Washington scales back its involvement in Europe, Merz has approved massive new government borrowing to rebuild the Bundeswehr and confront Russia. Putin mocks him for it.

Businesses are closing in Germany and people are losing their jobs, he said last week. Living standards are falling, and nobody knows why, except for the supposed need to confront an aggressive Russia. Where was the evidence, Putin asked. German intelligence services have repeatedly presented findings showing that Russia is carrying out sabotage in the country, including online. Putin rejects that and most recently claimed that the Merz government planted the Leipzig drones itself to make Russia look bad. Several AfD voters in Saxony-Anhalt independently said the same thing. The louder established politicians warn about the danger, the less they are believed by people who already distrust the elites.

AfD politician Hans-Thomas Tillschneider showed just how openly that sympathy is now displayed. Shortly before the election, a journalist spotted a mug in his office bearing the symbols of the Russian military. He initially put it away and explained that it had been a gift he did not want to throw out. On election night, he proudly showed off the mug and mocked the fear of Russia by calling it Germany’s most dangerous mug. He then offered it for auction, with the proceeds going to an ethnonationalist group.

In Berlin, the dispute moved into the Bundestag. Merz had accused the partly right-wing extremist party of pursuing a remigration plan that was nothing more than ethnic cleansing based on skin color and origin. The AfD parliamentary group then filed a criminal complaint against the chancellor. Its parliamentary managing director, Stephan Brandner, called the speech criminally relevant and described the words as defamatory insults directed at every member of the parliamentary group and at millions of citizens; the group, he said, stood firmly on the foundation of Germany’s Basic Law. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency describes remigration as a project aimed at creating ethnically defined societies and expelling everyone labeled as foreign to the people.

During the general debate, party leader Weidel proclaimed victory. The CDU-SPD coalition was finished and the CDU had been pulverized, she shouted. Public finances were wrecked, the result of an unprecedented debt policy. Merz fired back that the party was a destructive force harming Germany through its closeness to Moscow and promised continued support for Ukraine.

In Magdeburg, the party is already doing the math. He was aiming for the most stable cabinet possible, but would govern with a majority of just 1 vote if necessary, top candidate Siegmund said. If his parliamentary group could push through its most important demands, he intended to run for state premier. The dual leadership of Siegmund and Kirchner, which has headed the parliamentary group since August 2022, was unanimously confirmed, and Tobias Rausch remains parliamentary managing director. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider and Gordon Köhler remain deputy chairs. Matthias Büttner from Staßfurt joins them.

Every party rejected Siegmund’s offer of exploratory talks except the BSW, which accepted. The CDU and SPD turned down the offer. The Greens and the Left did the same. The SPD pointed to fundamental differences, and Green top candidate Sziborra-Seidlitz called it absurd to discuss the state’s future with a right-wing extremist party. The Left said it saw no basis for talks with a party that sorted people by origin and supposed belonging, and that political beliefs were also used by the AfD as grounds for sorting people. The BSW, by contrast, said it was willing to hold talks about energy supply and education. Peace policy was also supposed to be discussed. Its top candidate, Schulze, called the other parties’ refusals a bad sign for democratic culture.

The warnings came quickly. Peglow, chairman of the Association of German Criminal Investigators, sees an AfD-led government as a threat to security and the rule of law and wants access to sensitive information restricted. Tübingen Mayor Palmer calls the result a stroke of luck because the party failed to win an absolute majority and says he would put it in charge in a limited trial in which it would have to find its own majority for every proposal. SPD deputy chairman Schweitzer has floated an expert government backed by all the other parties to prevent an AfD state premier and warns against falling into paralysis.

Philosopher and former culture minister Julian Nida-Rümelin, himself an SPD member, warns against the counterreaction. Turning down an invitation because an AfD representative is attending would mean misunderstanding the firewall; a culture war from the right should not be answered with one from the left that labels everything it dislikes fascist. As long as the party is not banned, the state must treat it neutrally. A coalition with it is out of the question, he says, but supporting individual proposals from a minority government should be judged differently. Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria and, at 93, a Holocaust survivor, said that even in her worst nightmares she could not have imagined right-wing extremists winning elections in Germany like this again; now civil society and the media were needed to win young people over to democracy.

Applause came from Washington. During the night, Trump congratulated the AfD online, saying voters were sick of the terrible immigration rules that had hurt the country, and he put 3 exclamation marks after the letters MGGA, apparently meaning Make Germany Great Again. Wiese, parliamentary managing director of the SPD caucus in the Bundestag, rejected the interference and said Merz needed to confront the US president openly at their next meeting.

And so the path taken by a sentence comes full circle. It begins at a microphone in Moscow and ends on election night in Magdeburg, where a mug bearing the symbol of a foreign army is held up like a trophy. The autocrat betting on democratic exhaustion no longer has to say anything himself. It is enough for a country to start arguing with its own echo.