Saxony-Anhalt: The Vote Could Break the System

Saxony-Anhalt: The Vote Could Break the System

By Paolo Falconio

The result of the elections in Saxony-Anhalt cannot be read merely as yet another advance by Germany’s radical right. The 43.8% won by the AfD, with 39 seats out of 83, represents something more than an electoral victory: it is the manifestation of a profound fracture between a substantial part of society and the political system that claims to represent it. The CDU has collapsed to 17.2%, losing almost twenty percentage points, while voter turnout reached 77.8%, the highest level recorded in the state since 1989.

The politically most significant aspect, however, is the composition of the AfD’s support. The radical right is no longer attracting only conservative, nationalist or eastern German voters, but is also penetrating social groups traditionally associated with the left and, above all, with social democracy. Among workers, the AfD reaches 59%, while the SPD stops at 6%; among employees, it reaches 46%, compared with 8% for the SPD.

This is the breaking point. The AfD is occupying a space that historically belonged to the left: that of social protest and the representation of the productive classes. Despite showing a slight increase in second preferences, the SPD no longer appears capable of transforming its traditional categories – work, social protection and economic security – into a political proposal capable of winning back its electorate.

The phenomenon therefore concerns representation before it concerns ideology. When a party manages to attract support both from the traditional right and from segments of the popular electorate that once voted for the SPD, it means that the old political geometry is losing its explanatory power. The vote thus becomes an instrument of rupture with a system perceived as incapable of correcting its own course.

Many of those who vote for the AfD have not necessarily become radicalised in their convictions; they have simply found in that party the only channel through which to express a discontent that the traditional parties are no longer capable of detecting or addressing.

The AfD has inserted itself precisely into this vacuum. Its strength derives not only from identity issues or immigration, but from its ability to connect different themes within a narrative of change: employment, energy costs, the industrial crisis, security and rejection of the green transformation. The promise of restoring Germany’s competitiveness, including through a different relationship with hydrocarbons and Russian gas, thus becomes linked to the demand for a more restrictive migration policy and the search for a renewed national identity.

The crises of the CDU and the SPD therefore represent, in this sense, two sides of the same difficulty. The former is losing its conservative electorate to the right; the latter is no longer able to prevent part of the popular classes from looking elsewhere for an answer to their material circumstances. The AfD is therefore not merely taking votes from a single party: it is challenging the overall ability of the traditional system to transform social conflict into political representation.

From this perspective, the result in Saxony-Anhalt takes on a national dimension. Germany’s problem is not merely the growth of the AfD, which opinion polls now indicate as the leading party at the national level in terms of relative strength, but the progressive loss of the traditional parties’ ability to interpret economic, social, territorial and identity-related demands. When this mechanism breaks down, the anti-establishment vote becomes the point of convergence for different demands.

The question of government remains. With 39 seats, the AfD is far from an absolute majority, which stands at 42 deputies. The other parties will therefore have to construct an alternative majority, while the principle of non-cooperation with the AfD represents the main political constraint.

But here the paradox emerges: the system may prevent the AfD from governing without necessarily reducing its support. If almost half of the electorate chooses a political force that the other parties consider impossible to enter into coalition with, a majority constructed against it may solve the parliamentary problem, but not the political one.

The real contest, therefore, concerns the reconstruction of political representation. As long as an increasing part of society continues to perceive the traditional parties as incapable of changing what it considers essential, the AfD will continue to feed on their failure.

The most significant fact about the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, then, is not simply that the radical right has conquered the state. It is that it is now speaking to an electorate that, for decades, had spoken through the SPD.

If the traditional parties do not once again become interpreters of the concerns of ordinary people, their decline will not be a possibility but a consequence. There is no shortcut: no electoral engineering, no political firewall, and no emergency coalition can replace the patient work of rebuilding the relationship with those who, every day, bring home an uncertain paycheque and see their future becoming narrower. Imposing idealistic visions on those who have lost faith in institutions is not merely a losing strategy: it is a form of indifference for which the electorate will sooner or later present the bill.

In summary, political systems do not break overnight: they develop cracks when institutions cease to do what they were created to do, namely, to transform social suffering and citizens’ demands into political responses.