A new path to power for the far right: Don’t moderate. Stay radical.

 

A new path to power for the far right: Don’t moderate. Stay radical.

 

The AfD’s victory in eastern Germany is challenging conventional wisdom about how populist parties win elections.

 

By MARION SOLLETTY

September 11, 2026 4:00 am CET

By Marion Solletty

https://www.politico.eu/article/a-new-path-to-power-for-the-far-right-dont-moderate-stay-radical/

 

For years, Europe’s far right appeared to face a choice: Moderate, or remain on the margins. The Alternative for Germany party’s landslide victory in Saxony-Anhalt suggests there may be a third option — radicalize and win.

 

The party’s performance in last weekend’s election, where it raked in 44% of the vote, shattered a widely shared illusion among the European mainstream that the far right was somehow destined to mellow on its way to power.

 

That has broadly been the path taken by Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen. The Italian prime minister’s tilt to the mainstream, especially when it comes to the EU and NATO, has given a name to the phenomenon: “Melonization.” Le Pen, for her part, has spent years “de-demonizing” her party, dropping calls to leave the EU and distancing the party from Russia after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

 

The AfD has moved in the opposite direction, doubling down on anti-immigration, anti-Islam rhetoric and its pro-Russian stance — and still surging at the ballot box.

 

With the far right polling strongly ahead of major elections expected this year and next in Sweden, France, Spain, Poland and Italy, the AfD’s breakthrough is reverberating far beyond eastern Germany. It raises a more troubling possibility for Europe’s establishment: that the next wave of populist challengers may see less reason to emulate Meloni or Le Pen — and more incentive to copy the AfD.

 

The election results in Saxony-Anhalt are proof that “nationalist and identitarian policies” are “exactly the kind of policy we need to win elections and save our countries,” Afonso Gonçalves, the leader of the ultranationalist Portuguese movement Reconquista, said.

 

The Italian former general Roberto Vannacci, who is challenging Meloni from the far-right flank she used to occupy, also cheered the win. “Now, keep calling us extremists,” he posted on X. “If half the population stands with AfD, the accusations of extremism, by definition, evaporate and vanish.”

 

From across the Atlantic, U.S. President Donald Trump weighed in on his social media platform Truth Social: “Wow! The Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night. They finally got tired of the absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations, which have hurt Germany so badly. THEY ARE ON THE RISE, and not going to take it anymore! MGGA!!!”

 

Meanwhile, in Italy and France, Le Pen and Meloni have abstained from commenting.

 

Diverging paths

The schism is not a new one. France’s National Rally broke with the AfD in the lead-up to the 2024 European Parliament election over comments by the German party’s lead candidates minimizing membership in the Nazi SS paramilitary organization.

 

Following the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, Jean-Philippe Tanguy, a member of Parliament with the National Rally, told French television he was “shocked” that so many “voted for people who downplay Germany’s Nazi past.”

 

By contrast, the AfD has surged to success in part by empowering some of its most radical figures. Ulrich Siegmund, the party’s leader in Saxony-Anhalt, first came to national attention in 2024 for his participation in a closed-door meeting in Potsdam to discuss plans for the mass deportation of migrants.

 

The AfD supports what it calls “remigration” — encouraging people of immigrant backgrounds to return to their ethnic countries of origin. The party’s platform in Saxony-Anhalt pitched “financial and non-financial incentives” to push documented migrants to leave the country.

 

This summer, some of the party’s senior members joined a “remigration summit” headlined by Gregory Bovino, the former commander of the U.S. Border Patrol who championed mass deportation across the Atlantic. They mingled with other far-right politicians and activists from parties such as Spain’s Vox and the U.K.’s Restore Britain, as well as Austrian ethno-nationalist Martin Sellner, who was banned from entering Germany after his participation in the Potsdam event.

 

In Portugal, Gonçalves is mulling launching a fully fledged political party to compete with the far-right party Chega. A poll commissioned by Reconquista and shared with POLITICO showed the movement could net approximately 5 percent of the vote in general elections.

 

Reconquista’s potential bid for political power is part of a wider European trend, in which activists are challenging far-right parties by outflanking them on issues like migration. Gonçalves has proposed revoking Portuguese citizenship from immigrants when it was awarded, in his view, “illegally” and “against the values of our nation and our identity.”

 

In France, rising figures such as Sarah Knafo, a member of the European Parliament whose party is allied with the AfD, have built momentum with campaign strategies similar to those deployed in Saxony-Anhalt, combining far-right stances with strong visual branding.

 

“There’s a premium on radical rhetoric,” said Jérôme Jamin, a political science professor at Liège University in Belgium who has studied populist movements in Europe and the US. “It pays off, more than it used to.”

 

Radical rebranding

Whether the AfD’s radicalism will be a winning recipe outside their eastern German strongholds remains an open question. While it fires up the most radical segment of the electorate, it also scares off many voters. That means it can yield significant wins at the local level, but fail at the national level, where candidates need to appeal to a broader segment of the electorate.

 

Germany’s mainstream parties have also vowed not to cooperate or form a coalition with the AfD. That so-called “firewall” is already making it difficult for the party to form a government in Saxony-Anhalt, where it is three seats short of an absolute majority. At the national level, where it is polling at 28%, the possibility looks far out of reach.

 

In France, far-right firebrand and polemicist Eric Zemmour tried to outflank Marine Le Pen, polling ahead of her in the early stages of the 2022 presidential campaign, only to crash in the actual election.

 

Zemmour’s challenge ultimately benefited Le Pen, said a former high-ranking member of his party, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “He made her look less extreme, and in doing so he did her a favor,” the politician said.

 

Then there’s the problem of governing. Once actually in power, populist platforms have a tendency to crash into reality, be it financial or institutional.

 

That, in turn, exposes them to the same accusations they have been throwing at centrist parties for years: that they are unable to improve their citizens’ lives in a significant way and should make room for those who can.

 

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule ended in a crushing election defeat earlier this year after the EU’s most autocratic leader failed to deliver on a number of promises. In the U.S., a cost-of-living crisis stoked by the Trump administration’s policies is leaving many Americans behind and has hurt the government’s approval ratings ahead of midterm elections.

 

Jamin, the political scientist, dismissed the idea that the AfD surge or the rise of online far-right activists is any different in nature from past populist waves in Europe, inflammatory rhetoric included. 

 

“We got Trumpism before the Americans did with [late Italian Prime Minister Silvio] Berlusconi,” Jamin said.

 

The difference, he said, was the international political environment. Where Washington might have once sought to check Europe’s far-right movements, the Trump administration — with its willingness to blow through legal and constitutional constraints — is instead inspiring them to go further.

 

“This coming from the White House makes people think, ‘We can do the same, this is the future of politics.’”