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Ok, seems you beat me to the post. Still, here is mine. German election in the state (Land) Sachsen-Anhalt. The far-right AfD got 43.8% of the vote, which is about 5% more than a far right party ever got in a fair and free election before there.
Together with the BSW (a splinter group of the Left who split off when the rest of the party became disenchanted with Russia in 2022) they have an absolute majority.
So far, the parties to the left of the AfD have had a policy not to cooperate with them, a concept called Brandmauer (fire wall, in the building safety sense). On the one hand, it is reasonable: if a party is incompatible with your values, you should not cooperate with it. On the other hand, being stuck in the opposition is a great way for a party to become more popular as other parties get blamed for policy failures. This is even clearer with the present situation in the German East, where the other parliamentary parties (Left, Green, social democrats, conservatives) would have to form one block (and get tolerated by BSW) to form a majority. Five years of a democratic spectrum coalition is unlikely to leave any of the parties with clear victories for their bases, so next time the AfD would simply score 60%.
At this point, I am hoping that BSW will just tolerate an AfD government instead -- it is Putin's will, after all. Sure, it will suck for the people who voted for traditional parties, but it will also not be the end of the world. If Hungary could survive Orban, Germany could probably survive an AfD government if push came to shove. Unlike in Weimar, we have built a few decades of democratic tradition. Still, if the price for avoiding this at the federal level is Sachsen-Anhalt (or most of the rest of the East, for that matter), then I for one am willing to pay that price.
Let them try to fix their demographic problems by blaming the immigrants. Let's see how their two (or so) universities will fare under their stewardship. Let's see how the AfD will influence the availability of medical services, after all, not only are a significant fraction of physicians in Germany foreign-born (and may feel slightly unwelcome), but a decent fraction of the German-born doctors would likely want to avoid their kids going to schools where the AfD sets the curriculum.
I get that people in the East feel left behind. It is not like Merz has their best interests at heart, he's working for Blackrock instead. But protest votes are not the answer. Germans of all people should know that there is always room for worse equilibria.
Satirist Martin Sonneborn has called for a reestablishment of the wall for decades (and this time it would actually be an antifaschistischer Schutzwall), and more and more I feel that reunification was a mistake. It would have been better to let them join what would become Schengen but keep them separate. An AfD running the government of East Germany would not be so different from Orban in Hungary, PiS in Poland, Haider in Austria and so on, all very tolerable from West Germany.
Ah, thank for adding context. Sounds like there's a real chance for AfD to win the governance of Sachsen-Anhalt, then. Still, that's (a) just one state and (b) still a slim majority that relies on a very different party to help it keep it's coalition. So would expect them not to accomplish much. Maybe this will actually cause their support to break, if they finally win power and people realize... it's still just a regular political party, they're not going to snap their fingers and magically solve everything. They probably can't even significantly affect immigration.
OK, this would be hilarious. And it opens the door for the funniest election ever. Germany wants a president who is has experience building a giant border wall along politically contraversial territory. Someone with huge name recognition, a fresh approach to politics, and no sense of shame. He's got experience, but he'll be a free agent after 2028. He even has (distant) German ancestry, making him potentially eligible for citizenship if they can dig something up. Drumpf for Deutschland, 2028!
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What makes the AfD far-right? They're pro-democracy, they oppose immigration sure- do they want to change the German constitution? Do they support irredentism or want to revoke civil rights from their opponents?
I don't think the AfD is likely to be good at governing, but that is a separate criticism from far-right, which I haven't seen any evidence for.
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