The Fall of the Berlin "Firewall"

The stronger the AfD becomes, the harder it becomes to justify a political system in which electoral success does not translate into a realistic path to government.

Filip Gašpar is a political advisor, publicist, and commentator specializing in strategic communication, international positioning, and conservative political networks. A German-born Croat whose family originates from Bosnia and Herzegovina, he has written for outlets including JUNGE FREIHEIT, The European Conservative, and numerous publications across the former Yugoslavia.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily align with those of The American Postliberal.

For years, Germany was widely regarded as the last great bastion of political stability in the West.

While other democracies experienced populist revolts, collapsing party systems, and growing distrust of established institutions, Germany appeared largely immune to suchupheavals. The September elections may suggest otherwise.

More than a test of the AfD’s strength, they could reveal the extent to which the political order that shaped Germany after reunification is beginning to give way to something new.

In September, voters in Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Berlin will participate in a series of elections that may prove more consequential than any Germany has held since reunification. Together, they will provide the first major electoral verdict on Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government. More importantly, they may reveal whether the political arrangements that governed the Federal Republic for decades are beginning to break down.

Recent polling places the Alternative for Germany (AfD) at 29 percent nationally, making it the strongest party in the country. The governing coalition parties, the CDU/CSU and SPD, together command only around a third of the electorate. The CDU itself has fallen to roughly 21 percent, a remarkable decline for a party that once served as the principal pillar of Germany’s political order.

The significance of these elections extends far beyond the fortunes of any individual party. They may mark the moment when a long political transition becomes impossible to ignore.

Seen from this perspective, the AfD is not the cause of Germany’s political crisis but its most visible symptom. The deeper story is the gradual collapse of the postwar political consensus that structured German politics for decades.

For most of the Federal Republic’s history, political competition revolved around two large “people’s parties,” the CDU/CSU and SPD. Together they routinely commanded well over sixty percent of the national vote. Governments alternated between center-right and center-left leadership, while the broad assumptions of German politics remained largely intact regardless of which party happened to be in office.

Today those assumptions no longer command the same loyalty.

Support for the traditional governing parties has steadily eroded. Electoral fragmentation has become the norm rather than the exception. Coalition-building grows increasingly difficult with each election cycle. Governments often depend upon alliances between parties whose only clear point of agreement is opposition to a common rival.

No rival has benefited more from this transformation than the AfD.

Yet explaining the AfD’s rise requires looking beyond the party itself. Its growth reflects deeper tensions that have been building within German society for years.

The most important of these tensions emerged during the migration crisis of 2015.

For many Germans, the decision by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government to admit hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers represented a turning point in their relationship with the political establishment. Supporters viewed the decision as a humanitarian necessity. Critics saw it as evidence that the government had lost control of the nation’s borders and was unwilling to consult the public on one of the most consequential decisions in modern German history.

Regardless of one’s view of the policy, its political effects were profound.

Perhaps most importantly, the migration crisis contributed to a growing perception that major questions involving national identity, sovereignty, and social cohesion were being decided without meaningful democratic consent. Public confidence in established parties eroded.

Concerns about migration increasingly became concerns about representation itself.

Many voters concluded that political elites were more committed to defending an ideological consensus than responding to public opinion. The AfD became the principal beneficiary of this shift.

Originally founded as a Eurosceptic party focused on opposition to the common currency, it transformed after 2015 into the primary political vehicle for voters dissatisfied with Germany’s migration policies and the broader direction of the country. What many observers interpreted as support for a particular party was often something larger: a growing revolt against a political establishment perceived as increasingly detached from public concerns.

What happened in 2015 extended far beyond migration policy. The crisis revealed a widening gap between governing institutions and a substantial portion of the electorate. That gap has continued to expand.

Economic stagnation, high energy costs, declining confidence in public institutions, and dissatisfaction with government performance have reinforced trends that first became visible more than a decade ago. The AfD is less the cause of Germany’s political transformation than its most visible expression.

It was against this backdrop of growing distrust, political fragmentation, and rising support for the AfD that Germany’s political establishment developed what became known as the Brandmauer, or firewall.

Originally conceived as a safeguard against cooperation with a party regarded as beyond the constitutional mainstream, the firewall gradually evolved into something larger. What began as an exceptional measure became an organizing principle of German politics. Much of Germany’s political establishment assumed that the strategy would eventually contain the AfD’s growth. Instead, the party continued to expand, eventually becoming the strongest political force in national polling.

The firewall was designed to contain the AfD; it may soon become clear that the firewall can no longer contain the political realignment that produced the AfD in the first place.

Contemporary German politics is defined by a central paradox. In most democratic systems, electoral success improves a party’s chances of exercising power. Germany’s firewall increasingly inverts that logic. As a result, the relationship between democratic competition and political legitimacy is becoming increasingly strained.

That tension was relatively easy to manage when the AfD remained a marginal force, however, circumstances have changed and the party is now the strongest political force in national polling. In parts of eastern Germany, it enjoys levels of support once associated with dominant governing parties.

What is ultimately at stake in September is not simply whether the AfD will continue to grow, but whether the political system can indefinitely maintain arrangements designed for a political reality that no longer exists.

Nowhere is this question more visible than in eastern Germany.

More than three decades after reunification, the former East remains politically distinct from much of Western Germany. Economic differences, demographic changes, and lower levels of institutional trust have all contributed to different voting patterns. Yet reducing eastern political behavior to economics alone misses the larger point.

Eastern Germany increasingly functions as a political laboratory for trends that later spread throughout the rest of the country.

The contrast between eastern and western Germany remains striking. Recent polling places the AfD at 40 percent in the East, compared with 26.5 percent in the West. Far from being a regional anomaly, Eastern Germany increasingly appears to be the leading edge of Germany’s political transformation. Trends that emerge there first often spread westward later. If that pattern holds, the developments visible in Eastern Germany today may foreshadow the future of German politics as a whole.

Just as Eastern Germans helped bring about the political transformation of 1989, eastern voters may now be driving another realignment whose consequences extend far beyond the region itself. The coming vote will reveal whether that realignment continues to deepen.

Germany’s political establishment long assumed that the AfD represented a temporary disruption rather than the beginning of a deeper political realignment. These elections may demonstrate that the phenomenon is no longer temporary.

If current polling holds, Saxony-Anhalt could become the first German state in which the AfD emerges so dominant that every conceivable anti-AfD coalition appears politically strained. Even if the firewall survives, the effort required to maintain it will reveal the growing distance between Germany’s electoral realities and its governing arrangements.

Rarely has the transformation of German politics been captured so clearly in a single set of polling numbers.

In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD stands at 42 percent. The CDU receives 24 percent, while the SPD commands just 6 percent. Together, Germany’s two traditional governing parties command only 30 percent of the vote, twelve points less than the AfD alone.

Few developments illustrate Germany’s political transformation more clearly than these numbers. For decades, the CDU and SPD formed the twin pillars of the Federal Republic’s political order. Today, in one of Germany’s most important state elections, they no longer command enough support even in combination to rival the state’s strongest political force.

The implications extend far beyond Saxony-Anhalt.

An increasingly difficult dilemma now confronts Germany’s political establishment. The stronger the AfD becomes, the harder it becomes to justify a political system in which electoral success does not translate into a realistic path to government. At some point, a party supported by more than four out of every ten voters can no longer be dismissed as a temporary protest phenomenon.

The latest polling in Saxony-Anhalt suggests that Germany may be approaching that point. A movement that commands the support of 42 percent of the electorate is no longer operating at the margins of political life, it has become a central feature of the political landscape itself.

Questions long avoided by Germany’s political establishment are becoming increasingly difficult to postpone. At a certain point, electoral strength itself changes the nature of the debate. The question is no longer whether the AfD’s rise is temporary, but what happens when a party supported by a large share of the electorate remains permanently excluded from political power.

At the heart of the firewall lays a simple assumption: that the AfD could ultimately be contained. The AfD is no longer merely a protest movement. Increasingly it is a durable political force with deep roots in important parts of the country. Increasingly, the debate will shift from whether the AfD should be ignored to whether it can be ignored at all.

Berlin offers a revealing contrast. While politically and culturally distinct from Eastern Germany, the capital will provide an important indication of whether the broader fragmentation of the party system is spreading beyond the regions where the AfD has traditionally been strongest.

Taken together, the three elections will offer a snapshot of a country increasingly divided not simply between parties, but between competing visions of its future.

They will also provide the first major electoral verdict on Friedrich Merz’s government.

Merz entered office promising economic renewal, stronger leadership, and a reversal of the political drift that characterized recent years. Yet dissatisfaction remains widespread.

The governing coalition struggles to inspire confidence while the AfD continues to gain support. At the heart of Merz’s political project was the belief that a more conservative CDU could recover voters who had defected to the AfD. Much of Germany’s center-right assumed that he would succeed where previous leaders had failed. September may provide the clearest indication yet of whether that assumption was ever correct.

If the AfD continues to advance despite Merz’s leadership, the implications will extend far beyond the future of his government. They will raise fundamental questions about the ability of Germany’s traditional center-right to reestablish itself as the dominant force in national politics.

At the center of Merz’s dilemma lies a broader reality. As the AfD grows stronger, the firewall appears increasingly necessary from the perspective of the political establishment. At the same time, a stronger firewall makes it easier for the AfD to present itself as the only genuine opposition force within the system.

Yet the significance of these elections extends far beyond Germany itself. Germany is not merely another European democracy. It remains the economic engine of the European Union and one of Washington’s most important allies. Political realignment in Berlin inevitably affects debates over migration, energy, defense, economic governance, and the future of both European integration and the Western alliance itself.

As Europe’s largest economy and the political center of the European Union, Germany plays a uniquely important role in shaping the continent’s future. A major political realignment in Berlin would therefore reverberate far beyond Germany’s borders.

For American observers, the German case is significant because it reflects many of the same questions that have transformed politics across the Western world. How long can established parties govern while steadily losing public support? Can political systems maintain legitimacy when large populist movements remain excluded from power? What happens when the assumptions that once underpinned political stability no longer command majority support?

Nor are these questions uniquely German. Germany merely provides one of the clearest illustrations of trends reshaping politics across the Western world. That is precisely why these elections matter.

Germany’s central political question is no longer whether the AfD can win elections; in many parts of the country, it already has. The more consequential question is whether the political order that emerged after the Cold War can continue to function as the electorate itself changes.

What is at stake extends far beyond a series of regional elections.

Historians may ultimately remember September 2026 not primarily for who won these elections, but for what they revealed about the state of German democracy. The significance of these contests may lie in the extent to which they expose the growing distance between Germany’s electoral realities and the political arrangements that have governed the country since reunification.

The continued rise of the AfD, despite years of political isolation and institutional resistance, suggests that Germany may be confronting something more profound than a temporary protest movement. If current trends continue, September could mark the moment when the country’s long political transition ceased to be a matter of speculation and became impossible to ignore.

These elections may be remembered as a turning point, not because they immediately transformed German politics, but because they revealed how profoundly it had already changed.

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