AfD’s Second State Victory: What Happens When Winning Does Not Mean Governing?

For the second time in two weeks, the Alternative for Germany won a German state election — but winning did not necessarily mean governing, and that distinction is becoming more important than the victories themselves.

Two weeks earlier, the AfD had taken 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt. One result could be treated as an electoral earthquake. Two begin to look like a political condition.

Yet, the AfD is still unlikely to govern either state. That is the paradox now confronting Germany. The country has developed an effective mechanism for preventing the AfD from converting electoral victories into executive power. What it has not developed is an equally effective mechanism for preventing the party from winning those elections.

The Second Victory Changes the Question

After Saxony-Anhalt, it was still possible to explain 43.8 percent as an exceptional result in an exceptional state. Eastern frustration, economic stagnation, migration, energy, Ukraine, Russia and the long memory of reunification all offered plausible explanations.

Those arguments have already been made.

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania changes the question. The AfD did not need another 43.8 percent to prove that Saxony-Anhalt was not an isolated eruption. It needed another victory. It got one.

Perhaps the most extraordinary number, however, was not 38.2 but 4.9.

The party of Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel, today led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, failed to cross the threshold for entry into a German state parliament for the first time in its history. The party it has spent years promising never to govern with received almost eight times as many votes.

The firewall held. The people standing behind it were disappearing.

The story is therefore no longer simply about the rise of the AfD. It is about what happens to the political system built to contain it.

The Firewall Works. That Is the Problem

It is tempting to say the firewall has failed. In its narrowest sense, it has not. The AfD has become one of Germany’s largest political forces and has now won consecutive state elections with results approaching 40 percent. It still has no minister-president.

In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the arithmetic is straightforward. The AfD has 32 of 71 seats, the SPD 29, while Die Linke and the Greens hold five each. Together, the latter three control 39 seats, enough to form a majority without the election winner.

There is nothing unconstitutional about this. Germany is a parliamentary democracy and governments are formed by parliamentary........

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