Germany’s state of Saxony-Anhalt is, on current arithmetic, one vote away from a parliament in which no government can be formed on the terms the rest of German politics accepts. The far-right AfD’s strength in the east has produced a situation the mainstream parties have spent a decade trying to avoid without ever resolving it.

The firewall, and what it costs

German politics operates a convention known as the Brandmauer, the firewall: mainstream parties do not govern with, or rely on the votes of, the AfD. It is not a law. It is a commitment repeatedly restated by the CDU, the SPD, the Greens and others, rooted in the specific German judgement that some parties are not ordinary coalition partners.

The arithmetic problem it creates is mechanical. If a party polling in the thirties is excluded, every remaining combination has to be assembled from what is left, which increasingly means coalitions of three or four parties spanning most of the ideological spectrum. Those governments are slow, they compromise on everything, and they are vulnerable to a single partner walking out.

They also produce a feedback loop the AfD’s opponents acknowledge privately: an unwieldy coalition that governs badly is the strongest argument for the party it was built to exclude.

The two positions, stated properly

Those who defend the firewall argue that the AfD is not a normal party of the right — sections of it have been designated as extremist by Germany’s domestic intelligence service — and that normalising it through cooperation is precisely how such parties have historically been legitimised. On this account the cost of awkward coalitions is simply the price of the commitment, and a democracy that cannot pay it has already conceded.

Those who question it argue that a permanent exclusion of a party supported by a third of voters in a region is not a neutral act, that it confirms the AfD’s core claim to be the only alternative to a cartel of established parties, and that it has not worked: the party’s share has risen through every year of the firewall’s operation.

Both sides are reasoning from the same twentieth-century history and reaching opposite conclusions about what it requires.

Why the east is different

Saxony-Anhalt is one of the states of the former East Germany, and the pattern there has been consistent across elections: weaker party attachment, smaller and less rooted local branches of the mainstream parties, sustained demographic decline as younger people leave, and a long memory of the post-reunification decade in which industries closed and people were told the outcome was progress.

Those conditions produce electorates that are volatile rather than ideologically fixed — the same regions swung heavily to the Left party in earlier decades. That is the strongest argument against treating the current result as permanent, and it is also the argument for taking seriously what the volatility is responding to.

What to watch

Whether a governing coalition can be assembled at all, and how many parties it takes; whether any mainstream figure at state level breaks with the firewall on a specific vote, which is how such conventions usually erode; and whether the parties excluded from power start behaving as though the next federal election, rather than the state one, is the real contest.

Sources

• Reporting on the 2026 Saxony-Anhalt state election and coalition arithmetic, September 2026
• Euronews, on AfD polling strength in eastern Germany, 4 September 2026