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So... big win for AfD last night: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4zejgz3z9o. How important is this?
Since I'm not one to closely follow European politics, at first I thought this meant that they had won control of the entire national parliament. But then I noticed that, no, it's just one state election, and they're still short of a majority. In every other state, they have far less support, and every other party is still maintaining a rule to never work with them, so the AfD is still effectively shut out of power everywhere.
I suppose it's another sign of their trajectory, though. They seem to win more and more votes in every election. I remember when, not long ago, they were an extreme minority fringe party. Now they get enough votes that it's difficult for the other parties to form a coalition without them.
Is this a sign that the people of Germany are secretly longing to Nazi again? I doubt it. They seem to still be, on the whole, an extremely leftist-liberal nation. Pro-immigration, pro-welfare, anti-militarism, anti-nationalism, and anti-nuke. So I wonder how much this surge in support for AfD is driven by immigration, or how much of it is just them being the only real conservative party that gives voters an alternative to the status quo?
I also wonder what the AfD would actually do if they came into power? There's a big range between "slightly restrict immigration" and "force all the immigrants to pack up and go home." I suspect they haven't entirely figured it out themselves, since for now they're still just a protest vote. Not to mention how they'd have to figure out their policy on every single other policy issue. It's easy to make big promises when you have no actual power to deliver on them.
But I don't know! Maybe I'm wrong. I really don't know much about German politics, I just saw this and I thought it was interesting. Anyone else have thoughts?
Despite the German claim of being a multi-party parliamentary democracy, in effect there are two parties, "AfD" and "not AfD". Not-AfD won. Unless AfD gets a clear majority, they get no power.
This is not how it works in practice in multi-party parliamentary democracy:
There are long-standing political norms of giving opposition posts related to control of power. They are lead various oversight or budget comitees, there are constitutional provisions where substantial minority of MP can start procedures such as compel investigations, summon ministers to explain stuff etc. There is considerable power given to opposition - doing away with it is exactly in line with what is usually called as tyranny and Trumpian norm-breaking. This is BTW already happening, which creates interesting and dangerous precedent including constitutional court rulings etc.
Voting is nowhere near unanimous. MPs travel, they get sick. Many laws come not from EU and not from state government, there are procedures of how to introduce votes for amendments to laws etc. In practice, many laws require much more than just agreement inside coalition.
In practice such a rainbow coalition is hell to manage - you have to have coalition of greens (Die Grünen), literal commies (Die Linke), pro-business libertarian party (FDP) as well as Christian democrats (CDU/CSU). It is vastly different from US, where each House Member or Senator has to have 50%+ votes. In Europe the most radical lunatics can get 5% and get into parliament. They are structurally not dependent on some governing body like DNC or RNC, they are dependent on their own donors and voters.
If you construct such a coalition, they have hardly any overlap, they have vastly different opinions on things like budget, taxes, regulation and literally everything. It is impossible to present a program that would not cross some red line of some party. So even if they are disciplined, they don't get anything done and it increases power of opposition. If they get together and get something done, it then crosses red line of some party thus angering the party base and voters. It is lose lose situation.
The Brandmauer (German version of the "cordon sanitaire") says the AfD does not get the benefit of this. Which makes the system basically as if the AfD is one party and the other parties are all simply factions of another party.
It is much worse than age old Christian Democrats vs Social Democrats duopoly, in which the losing party would hold these positions to control power. It was designed to give the government legitimacy, to appease to voters voting for losing party so they viewed the system as legitimate and at least somewhat under control, it fostered participation at least in this form of oversight.
The current Brandmauer system is banana republic "winner takes all" democracy. It is much more dangerous than just simple duopoly, even more dangerous than what is now seen in US.
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In the sense that the AfD is the only party willing to contradict the polite society consensus on culture war issues, yes.
Not even then. We have a very robust deep state in Germany.
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Accurate, but if the CDU really wanted to kill the AFD it would be quite easy.
AFD back below 20%. Re-embargo them. Ban them. And now they won't be strong enough to fight back.
Modulo unforseen AI circumstances, only drastic action now can save Germany. The surest route to doom is slow and steady.
Yeah this is basically what the Sweden Democrats just did in coalition with the Swedish center-right, and not only did their support collapse, so did the center-right’s and now the left who implemented mass immigration in the first place will come back to power.
Collapse in support for the SD is now that they just stopped growing?
Also, it was the rightwing government of 2006 that implemented mass migration, not the left.
To me it's very unclear what the "leftwing" coalition even wants because they're so different from each other. The social democrats have moved significantly rightward on immigration to stop the bleeding to SD, which in turn has led to some people leaving the social democrats for further leftwing parties. I doubt the social democrats are willing to budge significantly on this because then people will leave them for SD again. V and MP might say they want more migration but that doesn't mean they will get it.
Economically you have both the most leftwing and "rightwing" parties in the same bloc, how exactly is this supposed to work? Who knows!
Finally, the rightwing seems to be trending upwards and the leftwing downwards, so even if the "leftwing" wins it doesn't look like it will be a sweep.
Everything you say is true but it doesn’t change the fact that
(1) Even if the social democratic leadership has pivoted marginally rightward on immigration, the actual functionaries, MPs and think tank types believe the same things about immigration as they always have. Same is true for Labour in the UK or indeed the Democrats in the US.
(2) Even if they don’t pivot leftward politically, a durable socdem coalition is still not going to do right wing things on immigration (restricting naturalization further, more deportation, tougher on crime) and block them from happening for at least a number of years, so demographic change will continue.
(3) Leading social democrat and left aligned (so likely coalition member) politicians have already come out against flagship policies like lowering the age of criminal responsibility (which mainly targeted immigrant gangs). So they’re clearly bullish.
I don't think there's anything "marginal" about S shift at this point, particularly on migration. You can argue that S still isn't restrictive enough, or that there are people within the party who would prefer the old line, but that's different from saying the shift itself has been marginal or what the current leadership argues for and believes.
And I think there's a fairly strong selection effect in looking at S-adjacent intellectuals and activists here. The people most visibly complaining about the current direction are (unsurprisingly) disproportionately from the organised party left, Reformisterna, Katalys and people in that milieu, because they're the people who lost the internal debate. They're public critics of the leadership line, not evidence that the leadership line doesn't exist; although I guess it might be hard for foreign observers to tell. Furthermore, it's hardly universal: Tiden, probably the most straightforwardly S-aligned think tank, has itself had prominent people arguing for a much more restrictive migration policy.
Andersson and the current leadership have spent several years consolidating a restrictive migration line. So, I'm not sure why the preferences of "functionaries" or think-tank people who disagree with the leadership should tell us more about where S is going than the policies the party has actually adopted and the MPs voting record.
And the framing of lowering the age of criminal responsibility as some kind of flagship test is just bizarre, both because S supported lowering it to 14, because it wasn't a flagship issue, and because a big reduction in gang violence happened before it even took effect. It was mostly a brief culture-war flashpoint, which I assume is why you've heard about it.
On (1), I don't really know how we're supposed to establish what anonymous party functionaries and think-tank people "actually believe" or how influential they are, much less why that should take precedence over what the party campaigns on, legislates for and votes for. The turn on migration isn't marginal at this point. S's current position is explicitly that the restrictive migration policy should remain, and they've moved right on questions which would have been extremely controversial within the party a few years ago, never mind the "humanitarian superpower" of a decade+ ago.
On (2), "a SocDem government isn't going to do right-wing things on immigration or crime" is just plainly false. They've voted with the rightwing government on almost all the tough on crime measures proposed in the parliament and are in some ways proposing to go further than the rightwing.
You're describing lowering the age of criminal responsibility as a flagship anti-gang policy and then using S's opposition to the original 13-year proposal as evidence that they're going soft. But why is that particular measure the test of anything?
The much bigger shift in Swedish anti-gang policy (and these policies apply for minors as well) has involved things like preventive surveillance, vastly expanded secret coercive measures, security zones, harsher penalties for gang-related crimes, more camera surveillance, attacking the gangs' assets and so on. S has supported almost all of this. For instance, they voted in favour of allowing secret and preventive coercive measures against children under 15, including communications interception and secret data access. And this wasn't some divided-party vote: all 93 S MPs who participated voted for it, with zero voting against or abstaining. You can see the party breakdown in the Riksdag vote here. So it's difficult to square that with the picture of a party fundamentally opposed to tougher policing of juvenile gang crime.
They're also currently campaigning on tougher sentences, removing sentence discounts for multiple serious offences and introducing a RICO-inspired "maffialag" aimed at organised criminal networks (something they're arguably even more for than the rightwing bloc). Whatever you think of those policies, that's hardly a soft-on-crime platform.
And the criminal-responsibility example is hardly some slamdunk evidence of the contrary because S's actual position wasn't to not lower it. They opposed the government's attempt to go down to 13 and supported the expert inquiry's proposal of a temporary 14-year threshold for the most serious offences. The government then abandoned 13 because it couldn't get it through parliament and adopted 14 instead.
More importantly, the huge reduction in gang shootings happened before any of this. Sweden went from 391 shootings in 2022 to 296 in 2024 and 158 in 2025, and the decline continued very sharply through the first half of 2026. The reduction to 14 doesn't even take effect until September 10, 2026. So whatever one thinks about lowering the age, it's obviously not what produced the turnaround in shootings. To be clear I personally don't care about the objections against the lowering of age of responsibility, it just didn't matter here.
Of course an S-led government would change some Tidö policies, particularly if it depends on V and MP. But you're taking the few and inconsequential areas where S is less restrictive than the current government and treating those as if they demonstrate that the whole rightward turn is cosmetic.
It isn't. On migration S is vastly to the right of where it was a decade or even 4 years ago, and on crime it supports many policies which would themselves have been regarded as exceptionally hardline. The interesting question is what concessions V and MP could actually extract from S in government, not whether individual politicians somewhere on the left would personally prefer the policies of 2014. Perhaps you don't think this is enough but there has been massive change.
My personal belief on what will happen if the left wins is that the proposed "RICO"-law will go through and that S will mostly hold the line against removing the tough on crime legislations (probably with the exception of the security zones which will be removed).
The focus of a leftwing government will be things like for profit actors in the welfare sector and foreign aid, not opposing broadly popular tough on crime or anti immigration measures. To the extent they will touch immigration it will likely be through things like forced integration in schools and new housing developments.
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Yeah, it's why socialist messaging is so powerful. "We can give you the impossible utopia, and it's only greedy capitalists that stand in the way. Still not working after
10,20,30 years? It's just the greedy capitalists wreckers. The solution is more power for me". It's evergreen.Actually fixing problems that normal people care about doesn't work. They've done it in Sweden and people got bored and moved on. People won't vote for the right unless there are hand grenades on the streets. And the next time it happens, it probably won't matter if they vote right or not since they'll have been replaced.
Cheap travel and third world migration is to Europe what smallpox was to the Native Americans. They just have zero resistance.
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A Reuters article indicates otherwise.
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There are suggestions that BSW is considering breaking the firewall and forming a majority coalition with AfD.
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In this case it’s close enough that it would be difficult, especially if it was repeated nationally.
The CDU/CSU coalition ruled out working with the far left [successor to the ruling party of East Germany], which in effect means a situation in a German election where the AfD get more than about 35-40% of seats, given parliamentary thresholds, just results in repeat elections until either they fall below that line or get a majority, or until the center right work with them.
And in both Austria and Sweden the center and hard right have been in coalition together, so it’s likely to happen in Germany eventually.
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