Germany – AfD party

Germany is heading into a critical election year in 2026, with five state votes set to challenge Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right-leftist (CDU-SPD) coalition.

Public dissatisfaction with the government is high, driven by stalled reforms, broken promises, the inability to handle illegal migration, and internal infighting, leaving the right-wing AfD poised to make historic gains.

In the eastern states of Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the party is positioned to dominate local politics unless centrist parties can form broad coalitions. Even in regions where the AfD is not leading, its growth signals a significant shift in voter sentiment, challenging the traditional dominance of the CDU and SPD.

Germany’s interior ministry has sounded the alarm over a growing threat to members of the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), following a series of arson attacks and physical assaults carried out by far-left extremists.

In the latest incident, a car belonging to Bernd Baumann, the AfD’s parliamentary group leader, was set on fire outside his Hamburg home in the early hours of Monday morning. The blaze destroyed three nearby vehicles.

Last night the car of the AfD politician Dr. Bernd Baumann was set on fire outside his home.

3 other cars caught fire and were also destroyed.

This is antifa terrorism in Germany.
My car & my parents car were also burned down, years ago.

The state does nothing – they persecute… pic.twitter.com/iRXuMDLg4P

— Martin Sellner (@Martin_Sellner) November 3, 2025

Germany’s establishment parties appear totally incapable of slowing the AfD’s surge in popularity across the country and may soon have no choice but to scrap their ‘firewall,’ which forbids cooperation. In some areas, especially in the eastern parts of the country, this policy might not matter soon anyway, with the anti-immigration party looking close to entering government.

Mainstream parties are increasingly allowing the far right to set the agenda, researchers in Germany have found, describing it as a shortcoming that had unwittingly helped the far right by legitimising their ideas and disseminating them more widely.

The findings, published in the European Journal of Political Research, were based on an automated text analysis of 520,408 articles from six German newspapers over the span of more than two decades.

The Berlin-based researchers found that as the far right moved from fringe issues in the late 1990s to topics such as integration and migration, mainstream parties had increasingly reshaped their communications to respond, boosting the spread of these ideas and signalling to voters that these ideas and stances were legitimate.

Someone inform the Guardian the AfD is the mainstream.

The right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has crossed the 40% mark in a regional poll for the first time—an unprecedented result that signals a major political shift.

According to a survey conducted by the INSA for the news portal Nius, the AfD would achieve 40% if state elections in Saxony-Anhalt were held this Sunday. This represents a ten-point increase since June and the highest level ever recorded for the party in any German state. The governing CDU follows at a distant 26%, losing eight points, while the Left Party stagnates at 11%. The SPD and the left-wing nationalist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) stand at 6% each. The Greens and the liberal FDP would fail to enter parliament with only 3%.

On Sunday, around 13.7 million people went to the polls in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia. The results were losses for the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and a bitter blow for the environmentalist Greens.

The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) saw a respectable showing, but it was the partly right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) that made the strongest gains.

At stake in the local elections were around 20,000 parliamentary seats in almost 400 towns and municipalities, as well as mayorships in larger cities.

With a roaring noise, the yellow excavator razes the last remains of another derelict property in the Bismarck district of Gelsenkirchen to the ground. An entire street with seven houses is being flattened to make way for new houses and a kindergarten.

The dilapidated properties and piles of rubbish in the street were not only a huge nuisance for local residents, but also a big campaign issue for the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD)which linked it to labor migration from Southeast Europe.