The Triumph of the Alternative for Germany: How Did It Happen?

The victory of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the Saxony-Anhalt state election, with a striking 43.8 percent of the vote, is currently being presented in fairly narrow and tendentious terms. Until now, the party’s best result had been 32.8 percent in Thuringia in 2024. The electoral trajectory of recent years is clearly moving in AfD’s favor. Meanwhile, liberal media outlets are already drawing parallels with the NSDAP’s 1933 victory in Germany, while in Ukraine commentators are painting an alarming picture of a looming loss of German military and financial aid.

It is worth examining the electoral mechanics behind AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt win, because they are both instructive and distinctive. Today AfD is no longer a marginal protest force but a party capable of making a genuine bid for federal power. The secret lies precisely in the skillful use of political technology and the conversion of economic grievance into electoral capital. How exactly was this achieved?

Mobilizing turnout and capturing passive voters

Voter turnout in Saxony-Anhalt in the September 2026 election reached a record 77.8 percent — the highest figure for any state election since German reunification, and a jump of 17.5 percentage points compared to the 2021 state election. Here AfD managed something remarkable: it brought to the polls not just its core base, but also depoliticized citizens who typically do not vote at all. Nearly 30 percent of AfD’s votes — roughly 170,000 people — came from so-called passive voters. These are the citizens that traditional parties have long been accustomed to overlooking, concentrating their outreach instead on the already-engaged electorate. That habit backfired badly. Something similar happened with Zelensky in Ukraine in 2019, when he drew young and apolitical citizens to the polls and secured a decisive victory as a result.

Today’s average AfD voter is, for the most part, a working-age man living in a rural area or small town, aged 35 or older, typically without a university degree, employed as a laborer or self-employed.

Protest against the “political ghetto”

Fear of AfD pushed Germany’s party establishment toward the so-called Brandmauer (firewall) strategy — a categorical refusal to cooperate politically with AfD at any level or in any form. As fate would have it, this strategy ended up benefiting the far right. First, it unintentionally amplified attention to AfD, giving it the aura of a genuinely influential anti-system force capable of unsettling the ruling parties — and in doing so, it handed the anti-establishment electorate a vivid rallying point. Second, AfD gained the opportunity to present itself as a victim of an elite conspiracy and dirty political games. Notably, the negative campaigning waged against AfD by its opponents — accusations of xenophobia, fascism, racism — is increasingly perceived by voters removed from political nuance as an attempt to suppress opposition and alternative viewpoints.

Voting with the wallet

It is commonly assumed that AfD’s electoral success stems mainly from anti-immigration rhetoric and the defense of German identity. The Saxony-Anhalt election actually proves otherwise: migrants make up only 9 percent of the state’s population, compared to 15 percent nationwide. This is a region of Germany marked by economic and social decline, where cafés, shops, and small businesses are closing en masse, and where deaths outnumber births. Twenty-five percent of local voters named social welfare as the decisive issue shaping their choice, and 37 percent said AfD, more than any other party, was best equipped to handle the region’s economic difficulties.

In other words, AfD channeled broad social discontent into a sense of economic pain and correctly assigned the blame — to the current federal government under Merz. The far right won because, for a segment of the electorate, it became a way of punishing the established political order of the traditional parties. It offered an appealing counter-identity and employed a simple psychological device: we will bring control over the economic situation back into your homes.

That is why many voters in Saxony-Anhalt did not see AfD as right-wing extremism or a revival of Nazism, but as a chance to return to a normal past — a dynamic economy, safe cities, cheap energy (hence the party’s stance on resuming trade with Russia), and freedom from what they perceive as an overwhelming influx of migrants and a left-wing agenda.

Digital asymmetry

AfD’s communications campaign in Saxony-Anhalt was, from a technological standpoint, exemplary. The traditional parties — the CDU, SPD, Greens, and Left — effectively lost the battle for social media outright, hampered by a late start and legal restrictions on political advertising. AfD’s state leader, Ulrich Siegmund, had been building a systematic, high-quality TikTok presence since 2021. He first rose to prominence during the COVID-19 period, when Siegmund — a former marketer and then little-known local deputy with an upbeat manner and telegenic smile — began publicly criticizing lockdown restrictions, mask mandates, and vaccination policy.

Of the roughly 43.4 million total views accumulated by all political accounts in the state, 64.5 percent belong to Siegmund’s own channels. In August, the reach of his personal channel (28 million views) exceeded that of AfD’s entire federal parliamentary group (18.1 million) and of party co-leader Alice Weidel (17.9 million).

In effect, AfD was not selling a program in this state election — it was selling a leader and his depoliticized personal image, built on everyday aesthetics and emotional simplicity: a young, energetic, approachable guy. That appealing personal image overshadowed the perception of AfD as a radical party. Voters saw that the party’s front-line figures were not brownshirts, but likeable people. Short, emotionally charged videos, direct appeals to voters, and everyday scenes featuring Siegmund consistently outperformed the dry official statements of other parties’ state leaders, boosted further by social media algorithms favoring exactly this kind of content.

The “good mood” strategy

At some point, AfD’s political strategists concluded that the party would never gain electoral ground while operating within the conventional political discourse — it would simply keep being branded toxic and extremist. So they made a deliberate choice: to run a non-political “good mood” campaign designed to lower the psychological barriers to accepting AfD — that is, to reach voters through everyday social life, popular culture, and non-political events rather than through politics itself. They understood clearly that voters find it psychologically far more appealing to share a bratwurst at a community gathering than to attend a self-important political rally. Accordingly, AfD in the state became an organizer of mass family festivals, cultural events, and group rides on the cult Simson moped — a beloved symbol of East German identity among the so-called “Ossis.” These rides, in particular, proved to have a striking agitational effect: hundreds of participants riding through towns and villages with campaign banners kept the party constantly in voters’ sightlines, evoking warm, nostalgic feelings about a carefree past.

The relentlessly positive framing — even the very connotation of the slogan “Alles ist möglich” (“Everything is possible”) — shifted attention away from aggressive stereotypes about AfD toward an everyday human optimism, one embedded with the illusion of a return to the “old, safe Germany.” The format was deliberately calibrated to tap into nostalgia for East Germany and Ossi identity. This automatically defused the stigma of extremism attached to AfD and allowed the party to draw in a segment of conservative-leaning CDU voters.

AfD’s campaign in Saxony-Anhalt demonstrated a maximal degree of popular appeal and organic simplicity, which opened the door to state-level power. At the same time, it showed that the party’s future federal triumph hinges on overcoming its toxic image as a far-right extremist grouping. The technological toolkit AfD has developed is capable of delivering that outcome — the real question is whether the party has the political skill to step out of the margins into which the logic of the times, and the actions of the traditional parties, keep pushing it.