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How the AfD Benefits Politically From the Ukraine War’s Backlash

No election result is monocausal, and there are clearly many factors that have converged to make the AfD Germany’s most popular party.

As the dust settles from Sunday’s alarming election result in Saxony-Anhalt, the entire world is asking how Germany got here: A party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), with ties to right-wing extremists and a tendency to play down the country’s Nazi history, has come within inches of forming the country’s first far-right state government since the fall of Hitler.

“I naturally ask myself how it could have come this far, what the reasons are that we allowed right-wing populism—and, in large parts, right-wing extremist populism—to come this far,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, mused. Merz has reportedly decided that immigration is the answer, and is considering toughening Germany’s citizenship laws as a way to stop the AfD.

Left-wing voices have put forward more compelling explanations. France’s leftist presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has offered that “the AfD’s victory is the result of the neoliberal policies” of successive German governments. The economist Isabella Weber has pointed to evidence that AfD voters are in financially precarious situations, reminding us that “economic insecurity is the breeding ground for scapegoating and hate rooted in racism,” and calling for a fundamental shift in economic policy to tackle unaffordability.

Yet almost entirely left out from this postelection analysis is one major factor: the Ukraine war, and German policy toward it.

It is true that the economic downturn and rising unaffordability that have hit eastern Germany particularly hard are major drivers of the AfD’s ascent. But those conditions are the direct result of Berlin’s sanctions on Russia, which saw Germany suddenly deprived of cheap Russian oil and gas in 2022, causing the highest inflation since reunification three decades earlier and plunging the country into recession, an affordability crisis, and deindustrialization.

East German states, already economically lagging behind their Western counterparts, saw higher inflation rates. In 2024, one east German town actively called on Berlin to potentially go so far as to restore Russian oil shipments, since the Russian-owned oil refinery that served as its beating economic heart was left in fiscal peril. Last year, German industries in the eastern states began openly talking about and planning for the return of Russian energy imports in the event of a peace deal.

As we have seen in the United........

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