Germany’s AfD and BSW Converge in Saxony-Anhalt

What changed

Saxony-Anhalt may soon see Germany’s first postwar state government led by the far-right AfD and tolerated by the far-left BSW. Whether that arrangement is formed or survives remains uncertain.

The argument is that both parties draw on nostalgia for a former East German world of guaranteed jobs, housing, incomes and healthcare, even though the DDR was a dictatorship. Germany’s Nazi past, this reading says, is not enough by itself to explain the AfD’s strength.

Why it matters

Power changes the meaning of political ideas. Once a party enters government, positions previously treated as extremist can begin to look ordinary simply because they are now attached to ministries, budgets and official authority.

That is the sharper warning in Saxony-Anhalt. AfD and BSW disagree profoundly about politics, but they can still meet around hostility to the modern western order and dissatisfaction with life after reunification. The proposed arrangement therefore exposes a practical weakness in the usual left-right map: parties at opposite ends can cooperate when they share a longing for a lost social security.

The same pattern is presented elsewhere in Europe. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has become a respectable colleague to other European leaders, while in the Netherlands the PVV has been brought closer to political normality. The effect is cumulative. Each new cooperation lowers the barrier for the next one.

The outlook is conditional: if AfD-led rule in Saxony-Anhalt goes ahead and remains viable, it could further normalize the party’s presence in state power; if it collapses, the alliance may instead show how unstable cooperation between the two extremes remains.

The deeper point is uncomfortable but useful. Historical memory can preserve the moral lesson of dictatorship while losing the felt experience of why constitutional safeguards matter. If political parties treat the rule of law as dispensable whenever it protects groups seen as outsiders, democratic erosion can arrive through nostalgia as much as through ideology.