Germany’s
establishment has a plan to contain the far right. Sort of.
On Sept. 6,
the Alternative for Germany party is expected to break through the country’s
political “firewall.”
Ulrich
Siegmund walks past election campaign placards at the Alternative for Germany
campaign launch for state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, on June 4, 2026. | Sean
Gallup/Getty Images
August 24,
2026 4:00 am CET
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-afd-saxony-anhalt-ulrich-siegmund-government/
BERLIN —
It’s not the kind of photo op German Chancellor Friedrich Merz would likely
want to frame for his office wall: him standing next to Ulrich Siegmund, the far-right politician a national
magazine recently labeled the country’s “most
dangerous man.”
And yet,
such a picture might soon be hard for Merz to avoid. On Sept. 6, Siegmund
is set for a
sweeping victory in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. If his
far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party secures an outright majority in
the state parliament, Siegmund will likely become premier, and his party will
have broken through the political “firewall” that has kept it out of all
federal and state governments since its founding in 2013.
It would be
a historic triumph for the AfD and a shock to Germany’s political system.
As premier,
one of Siegmund’s earliest duties would be to take over the annually rotating
chair position of the regular conferences of Germany’s 16 state premiers. The
role usually comes with a visit to Berlin and a joint appearance with the
chancellor before the press.
Calling this
uncharted territory would be an understatement. “The AfD is questioning the
fundamental decisions made by the Federal Republic of Germany since
1949,” Merz
once said.
The
chancellor is not alone in his concern. All other major parties, and large
parts of the German media, see the AfD as a threat to the country’s liberal
postwar order. Yet, if the party takes power in a state for the first time, the
political establishment will no longer be able to keep it at arm’s length.
While normal relations may be out of the question, at least for the foreseeable
future, Germany’s federal system requires a minimum of cooperation and mutual
support.
So how would
the German establishment deal with a state governed by the AfD?
POLITICO put
this question to officials in the federal government and several state
governments. The reluctance to answer was striking, especially among Merz’s
center-right Christian Democratic Union and their Bavarian sister party, the
Christian Social Union. Senior party figures and state ministers either refused
to comment or would not be quoted by name.
The
hesitation is understandable. The CDU and the CSU once owned the political
space to the right of center. Today, the AfD is eating
into it. State ministers from both the Social Democrats and the Greens were
more prepared to discuss strategy on the record.
The
conversations for this article were dominated by a single concern: domestic
security, especially the protection of intelligence information, given the
AfD’s advocacy for closer ties with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
According to
Social Democrat Georg
Maier, who serves as the state of Thuringia’s interior minister, Siegmund’s
party has “good channels” to Moscow. “If the AfD provides the
minister-president in Saxony-Anhalt, the champagne corks will be popping in the
Kremlin,” he told POLITICO.
Although
there is no playbook yet for containing an AfD government, the thinking in
Berlin and several state capitals has already moved well beyond the abstract.
Option 1:
Hold extra informal meetings
One way to
limit the AfD’s access to sensitive discussions could be to simply have more
discussions. In addition to the gathering of state premiers that Siegmund would
be expected to chair for a year, Germany’s states regularly coordinate through
a network of ministerial “conferences.” Among the most important is the
conference of interior ministers, where some of the country’s most pressing
security and intelligence matters are discussed.
One
possibility being considered is to keep holding the regular meetings of the
interior ministers but also organize separate gatherings for particularly
sensitive issues. Only Germany’s 15 other interior ministers would attend these
meetings, without the representative from Saxony-Anhalt. Several ministers
confirmed this hypothetical scenario to POLITICO.
The idea
builds on a long-established practice in German politics. State governments are
informally grouped into so-called “A” and “B” states, depending on which
political camp holds the governing majority: Social Democratic-led governments
on one side, conservative governments on the other. Before major conferences,
both camps coordinate internally.
Applied to
the AfD, this model would put the ostracized government on one side and
everyone else on the other.
Christoph Degenhart,
a professor emeritus of constitutional law and former judge at Saxony’s
Constitutional Court, said the idea is definitely conceivable. “How long that
would work and whether the courts would tolerate it is, of course, another
question.”
Option 2:
Erect a wall
One of the
biggest worries regarding the AfD is its closeness to Moscow, according to
Maier.
Specifically,
the minister’s biggest concern is an AfD-led interior ministry. Whoever runs
such a department, he said, gains access to highly classified information. And
yet, excluding the entire state from Germany’s domestic intelligence network
would not be possible; public safety, including protection against terrorist
attacks, would rule that out.
“But we can
build Chinese walls into our joint information systems, barriers that block
certain information,” said the minister. He laughed briefly. “‘Chinese walls’
fits perfectly here. The AfD doesn’t just have a soft spot for Moscow,” he
added.
What
information would Maier wall off? “We would have to keep all intelligence
relating to right-wing extremism and the entire area of espionage away from the
AfD,” he said. Such a “preventive segmentation” would be legally possible, he
added, citing legal advice he has obtained. It could also be implemented
relatively quickly. “Government formation is not going to happen overnight,” he
said.
Patrick
Harr, a spokesperson for the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch, rejected all
accusations of closeness to Russia. “That’s complete nonsense,” he said. “We
don’t have a red telephone to Moscow.”
“We talk to
everyone, whether West or East,” he added. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to
hand over files. Anyone who claims otherwise is talking nonsense. If and when
we get access to such information, we understand our responsibility as a party
of government.”
But Konstantin von Notz, a Green
member of the Bundestag and deputy chair of its intelligence oversight panel,
pointed to Austria’s far-right Freedom Party’s (FPÖ) time in government as a
cautionary example. After entering government in 2017, the FPÖ took control of
the interior ministry. The following year, police raided Austria’s domestic
intelligence service and seized sensitive data, including information from
allied agencies.
Western intelligence partners then restricted the sharing of
confidential information, while Austria’s service temporarily pulled back
from working groups of the Bern Club — an informal network of Western
intelligence services, officially on a voluntary basis.
Germany
could face something similar under an AfD government, said von Notz, if for
example the country’s allies suspected Russia would be able to access the
database used by Germany’s domestic intelligence services to exchange
information on extremists, spies and other security threats.
“The
British, the Americans, the Poles, the Ukrainians — nobody would share
information with us anymore for fear that everything would be passed on to
Moscow,” warned the Green politician.
Option 3:
Cut off their funds
Another
instrument mentioned both by AfD figures and the party’s opponents is Germany’s
fiscal equalization system, which helps poorer states with money from wealthier
ones and additional federal funds.
Saxony-Anhalt
has depended on this system for decades. In 2025, it received around €2.8
billion according to preliminary figures — nearly one-fifth of its state
budget.
Reducing or
even halting such payments would be one way to make life harder for an AfD
government, or to coerce the party to behave in ways the political
establishment finds acceptable. Within the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch, this
scenario is seen as a real risk.
The legal
hurdles, however, would be high. Danyal Bayaz, the Green finance minister of
Baden-Württemberg, one of Germany’s wealthier contributor states, chose his
words carefully. “The fiscal equalization system is anchored in the
constitution and is not an instrument that can simply be changed according to the
political weather,” he said.
He then
added a caveat: A federal state based on solidarity, said Bayaz, depends on
shared commitments to the rule of law. If a state government were to call those
principles into question, or pursue legally dubious special paths, that would
affect trust and cooperation with the federal government and other states,
“including in financial matters.”
Bayaz’s
spokesperson stressesdthat this was the minister’s personal assessment, not an
agreed position of the state government — a coalition led by the Greens, with
the CDU as its junior partner.
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Option 4:
Deploy the nuclear option
The most
powerful constitutional instrument would be Bundeszwang, or federal coercion. Under Article 37
of Germany’s Basic Law, the federal government, with the consent of the
Bundesrat — the chamber representing the states — may take “necessary measures”
to compel a state to fulfill its legal obligations. In plain English: Berlin
could force a state government to obey federal law.
The
provision has never been used. In the reporting for this story, no one
interviewed brought it up on their own — perhaps out of conviction, perhaps out
of fear that merely mentioning it would play into the AfD’s hands before the
elections.
Within AfD’s
right-wing intellectual circles, federal coercion has long been treated as a
realistic scenario. In 2025, publisher Götz Kubitschek, whose estate lies in
Saxony-Anhalt and who the New York Times once labeled “the prophet of Germany’s
new right,” told POLITICO this is what he would expect to see
happen.
A potential trigger can only be guessed at. If, for example,
an AfD government in Saxony-Anhalt failed to provide for even the most basic
needs of asylum seekers, the federal government could intervene with binding
orders to restore those services, eventually through a federal commissioner
with the authority to issue instructions to the state and all its authorities.
Would all this work?
Whatever Germany’s political establishment does to contain
the country’s first AfD government, this fall or later, the risks are obvious.
Measures meant to defend liberal democracy could also feed the AfD’s central
grievance and that of many of its voters: that the establishment refuses to
accept the party even when it wins.
Public opinion on this is more divided than it once was. A
representative poll from July found that only 42 percent of Germans still considered it right
for the Social Democrats and the CDU to refuse cooperation with the AfD;
another survey showed that support for the exclusion strategy had fallen to 46 percent, down from 54 percent in early 2025.
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Doing nothing out of the ordinary may well be the safest
option for established parties. The AfD has spent years thriving in opposition,
turning its rivals’ mistakes and broken promises into political fuel. But it
has never governed. Once in office, it could become mired in incompetence and
internal infighting, sparing its opponents the need for special defensive
maneuvers.
Key figures in the AfD’s own orbit are aware of this danger.
“They have to prepare like the biggest overachievers,” Kubitschek told POLITICO
in 2025 regarding Siegmund’s state party. Benedikt
Kaiser, another influential far-right intellectual and aide to an AfD
member of the Bundestag, also advised caution if the party wins an outright
majority: “In the first 90 days of government, the AfD has to pursue a politics
that does not create fear,” he said, mentioning “family benefits, free school
meals, things like that” as examples.
Even as Germany’s political establishment considers ways to
contain an AfD state government, the party’s intellectual leaders are fretting
over a more immediate concern: Simply governing could prove a more effective
constraint on the party than any measure the country’s political mainstream can
devise.
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