Germany Had a Strategy to Contain the Far Right. It May Have Backfired.

RAGUHN-JESSNITZ, Germany — The first brick to fall in Germany’s so-called firewall against the far right was this town of some 9,000 people in the small eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

On July 2, 2023, a farmer named Hannes Loth won a mayoral runoff here with 51 percent of the vote, becoming the country’s first full-time, salaried officeholder from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Loth’s victory set off alarms across the country. The country’s mainstream parties had pledged to keep the AfD out of power over concerns that the far right could rise again. For more than a decade, this informal pact had made sure that right-wing nationalists could never be a part of a parliamentary governing coalition, at either the local or national level. But because Loth had won his race outright, there was nothing they could do to stop him from taking office.

“Something is beginning to slide in Germany,” Michael Kretschmer, Saxony’s prime minister and the most influential member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union in East Germany, warned at the time.

Three years later, Germany is approaching a far more consequential test. On Sept. 6, voters in Saxony-Anhalt will elect a new state parliament, and the AfD is in a position to win outright and gain control of a German state government for the first time. That win would put the AfD in control over schools, the police and the state’s intelligence service — and bring the firewall crashing down.

Even if the AfD falls short of a majority, the election would expose how badly the strategy of exclusion has strained Germany’s political system, making the position of the center right particularly untenable. To keep the AfD from power, the Christian Democrats would have to team up with another ideological enemy: the far-left Left Party. Such an arrangement would reinforce the AfD’s most powerful claim: that German elections can change the vote but not the government.

At a national level, a debate has broken out about the effectiveness of the firewall. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a Christian Democrat, has pledged to maintain it. “Cooperation between my party and this party and its officials is not possible,” Merz said recently of the AfD. “There can be no compromises,” he added.

The chancellor tries to avoid the term “firewall” these days, because he probably senses that the term is losing its persuasive power. But his position regarding the AfD still aligns with the firewall’s stated purpose: On one side of the wall, the story goes, stands the best of postwar Germany. On the other lies a return to its darkest past.

The counterargument, put forward by conservatives like the historian Andreas Rödder, is that the political firewall has achieved the opposite of its intended effect. It was meant to deprive the AfD of power and eventually of voters. While it has largely achieved the first aim, it has failed at the other. In 2025, the AfD doubled its vote from the previous federal election to 21 percent and finished second. Today, it also leads the national polls by a growing margin.

By excluding the AfD, Rödder’s argument goes, the establishment has created an ever-growing “representation gap,” removed any incentive for the party to moderate and trapped the center-right Christian Democrats in a growing dependence on parties to their left. Rather than walling off an entire party, he argues, Christian Democrats should draw red lines based on policy and constitutional principles — and be prepared to work with the AfD when those lines are respected.

In Raguhn-Jessnitz, the debate is already over. Loth, 45, has built a reputation for being a non-ideological pragmatist. Even at the local kebab shop, a Turkish employee calls him “very likable.” The man was granted anonymity to speak freely because, as he put it, the mayor’s party still didn’t sit right with him.

“There is no firewall in our municipality,” Loth says during a conversation in his office in August: “We all work together.” Tilo Hörtzsch, the local leader of the Christian Democrats, agrees. In a recent interview with German television, he praised the collaborative work with Loth on the city council as “very good.”

Policy of exclusion

In the beginning, the firewall’s advocates had reason to feel confident. Their basic strategy had worked before. Parties to the right of the political establishment had never lasted long in postwar Germany, in part because the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, fought them aggressively for conservative voters.

In 1987, the CSU’s most famous leader, Franz Josef Strauss, put the principle bluntly: “There must be no democratically legitimate party to the right of the CDU and CSU.” The firewall against the AfD was just the latest variation on this doctrine.

So why did it fail this time?

Frauke Petry is better qualified than most to answer this question. The 51-year-old chemist and entrepreneur has seen both sides of the firewall. She was one of the AfD’s early leaders — present when it was founded in 2013 as a fiscally hardline party fiercely opposed to using German money to bail out southern European countries. She left after a bitter internal dispute in 2017, when the party first entered the Bundestag.

Petry blames Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democrats from 2000 to 2018, for the AfD’s rise to the top of the polls. It was the then-chancellor’s decision in 2015 to let in nearly 900,000 asylum seekers, many of them fleeing the war in Syria, that allowed the party to emerge as a serious challenger. “Merkel proclaimed the firewall but no longer occupied the political space to its right,” Petry says. “Had her party pursued a different migration policy, the AfD could never have achieved this success.”

Merkel had been set on isolating the party from the beginning. As early as 2013, long before the AfD radicalized and began floating plans for the mass “remigration” of migrants, she had ruled it outas a coalition partner.

According to Petry, the exclusion began within weeks of the AfD’s creation. It intensified as the party gained voters and included the demonization of the party’s leaders in the media. In 2015 when she was still an AfD member, Petry says, landlords in the East German city of Leipzig refused to rent her an apartment because they feared attacks by far-left activists. On March 28, 2016, she received a threatening handwritten letter. One passage clearly threatened to disfigure Petry’s face; another told her and her family to expect “restless days and nights.” The writer added: “We will determine the time.” Later that year, Petry’s car was set on fire.

Merkel, 72, declined a request to discuss the firewall. So did the AfD’s co-leaders, Alice Weidel, 47, and Tino Chrupalla, 51.

Petry says that in any case the debate was already mute: “The firewall will fall. The only question is by what route.” Either parts of the CDU will reconsider, or the AfD will find other partners, such as Petry’s new party, Team Freedom.

“We are trying to tear down the firewall politically,” she says. “For greater freedom, we will work with anyone, including, of course, the AfD.”

Tear down that wall

The AfD is unlikely to take up Petry’s offer. Her party is polling so low in the polls that it’s generally not listed individually but grouped under “others.”

The more relevant debate is taking place within the ranks of the Christian Democrats who have held the chancellery for 53 years of the Federal Republic’s 77 years.

A growing number of Christian Democrats are calling for a more pragmatic approach towards the AfD. One of the first was Rödder. The conservative historian once led a commission on the CDU’s values, before giving up the post after coming under attack for questioning the firewall.

Rödder, 59, acknowledges that cooperation with the AfD could tear the CDU apart. But simply continuing with an instrument that does not work, he argues, offers no escape. “In the end,” he says, “the firewall is profoundly dangerous for democracy.”

Roderich Kiesewetter, a 62-year-old CDU lawmaker and former army colonel, disagrees vehemently. Kiesewetter has fought against a normalization of the AfD for years. In 2018, he helped pave the way for the party resolution that ruled out any form of cooperation. Together with another CDU member, Kiesewetter submitted a motion at his district party conference to exclude the AfD on all state levels. It was adopted and later expanded to include the far left.

For Kiesewetter, merely drawing red lines would be “fundamentally flawed,” he says, risking the gradual normalization of the AfD and, ultimately, “everything that has been built since 1949: trust among European states, our ties to the West, NATO and the euro.”

Asked about a potential vibe shift in the party, Kiesewetter replies without hesitation: “The CDU would cease to be my party if it entered a government with the AfD.” But he doesn’t sound downcast. “I consider such a scenario inconceivable.”

‘Anything is possible’

Kiesewetter is an experienced lawmaker. He knows, of course, that in politics, many things are inconceivable, right until the moment they become conceivable.

Theoretically, the CDU and AfD could form a massive non-left coalition in the state of Saxony-Anhalt in a few days. In fact, they could have already formed a national government after the election in 2025, not so dominantly, but with a comfortable majority.

Practically, it is more complicated.

One problem is the protests that would almost certainly follow. Germany’s left has an exceptional capacity for street mobilization, and unlike on the right, there is no comparable firewall between the political mainstream and the far left. Militant leftists are tolerated and in some cases openly courted by many politicians on the left. A CDU decision to cooperate with the AfD would risk triggering not only a civil war within the party, but a much broader confrontation on the streets.

Another, more formal obstacle is a resolution adopted at a national convention of the CDU in 2018. Unlike their American counterparts, German party conventions are working sessions where delegates actually debate and vote on binding rules — which is why such resolutions carry real weight. In this case, delegates ruled out “coalitions and similar forms of cooperation” with the AfD.

On closer inspection, however, this obstacle is likely surmountable. The party has found a way to work around a corresponding ban on cooperating with the Left Party, which traces its origins to the party that governed Communist East Germany. While not coalition partners, CDU-led governments in Saxony and Thuringia consult with opposition parties, including the Left Party, on legislation, helping to secure parliamentary majorities.

Officially, the CDU is still upholding the firewall. But unofficially, there is widespread nervousness. Merz, who in addition to being chancellor is the party’s chairman, is highly unpopular. For months there has been talk in the party of replacing him. And while that has died down ahead of the election in Saxony-Anhalt and two other states in September, a poor performance by the CDU in those elections would likely revive the discussion.

And it would probably not end with Merz. A rebellion by part of the CDU against the firewall itself may still be unlikely. But it is no longer unthinkable.

What would happen then is anybody’s guess. But, here too, Saxony-Anhalt could be the first place to show what comes next.

Hannes Loth, Germany’s first full-time AfD mayor, unintentionally spells out the risk.

“The first few months will certainly be turbulent,” he says of a potential AfD government in the state. “None of us really has government experience.”

Loth sums up the abrupt promotion awaiting some of his colleagues: “Bang, you’re a minister. Get on with it.” He laughs and adds that he believes his party is capable of learning quickly. “We’ll grow into the job.”

What Loth doesn’t say is that the job of governing also means being held responsible for compromises or failure. The AfD has never had to do that, leaving aside small communities like Raguhn-Jessnitz.

Just before the interview, Loth’s phone rings. It is the local volunteer fire brigade. “I’m sorry,” Loth says into the phone. “The town festival is canceled.” After the call, he explains: An infestation of toxic caterpillarshas ravaged trees across the town and cost the municipality €30,000, leaving too little money for the annual festival.

If it takes power in the state, the AfD would face similar tests, on a far larger stage. It would be held responsible for compromises, mistakes and failure, rather than simply campaigning against the establishment.

In Saxony-Anhalt, the party is campaigning under the slogan “Anything is possible.” If the AfD takes power after Sept. 6, it may soon discover what Loth already knows: In government, anything is possible — but rarely in the way those in charge had hoped for.

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