Magdeburg has delivered the verdict that Berlin spent two years pretending was hypothetical. On 6 September the Alternative für Deutschland took 43.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, the first time the party has topped a German state poll.It won 39 of 83 seats, three short of an outright majority, while Friedrich Merz’s CDU collapsed from 37.1 to 17.2%. The detail that should trouble Merz however is not the headline but the context: voter turnout rose 17.5 points to 77.8 per cent, and the AfD carried all fourteen districts and 38 of 41 constituencies. The CDU won none. This was mobilisation, not abstention: the electorate turned out in order to repudiate the existing government. It is not yet clear whether the AfD will have a working majority in the state parliament: the 5 seats won by BSW (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht) may prove decisive in forming a local government.
Merz has ruled out resigning before 2029. He has spoken vaguely of “consequences” of the political defeat, and asked aloud what fears his government had underestimated. Thus, the more instructive question raised by these election results is structural, rather than personal. Grand coalitions were conceived as instruments of stabilisation, now they are just the last resort before a new election round. The SPD, polling third nationally, and now blaming the government’s own rhetoric on work and welfare, cannot afford to concede further. Therefore, the risk from the 20 September votes in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is not that Merz falls, but that he survives defensively: a chancellor who purchases domestic quiet by withdrawing from European ambition on defence financing, capital-market integration, enlargement and Ukraine.
And yet the celebration was conspicuously incomplete. Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête rejoiced; Santiago Abascal from Vox in Spain saluted; Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella said nothing at all. Read this as strategy, not squeamishness. Le Pen imposed her cordon sanitaire on the AfD in 2024 and has no intention of surrendering a decade of dédiabolisation now that the July appeal has trimmed her ineligibility to 45 months, two-thirds suspended, restoring a path to 2027 — and now that the gains made in the municipal elections held in March and this month’s senatorial contest are converting the RN from protest vote into mainstream political choice.
Hence the European far right has now three churches: Patriots for Europe (RN, Vox, Lega), the ECR (Meloni, PiS), and Europe of Sovereign Nations, which houses both the AfD and — decisively — Roberto Vannacci’s Futuro Nazionale, founded in February and now polling 7-8 per cent, above both Lega and Forza Italia. Note where the growth originates: Vannacci is a tax on Meloni’s moderation, exactly as Vox at 18-20 per cent after the Ceuta crisis is a tax on Feijóo’s Partido Popular. In fact, in Germany, Italy and Spain alike, the insurgents are cannibalising the incumbent right, not the left. From this one can see how the political spectrum has shifted towards the right.
The implication for further European integration seems obvious: the moderate parties of the right (CDU, Les Républicains, Partido Popular, Forza Italia) and the left (SPD, Socialists, PSOE, PD) will have increasingly hard time creating working majorities to govern their respective countries and promote further integration at EU level. If the far right gets to power, whether alone or in coalition, the first victim will be further integration and speedier decision making in Brussels. Paradoxically, the far right will continue blaming Brussels for that. One hopes that the electorate is mature enough to be able to distinguish the cause from the effect.
