| The other big winner on Sunday night was the BSW, which was founded only last year when Wagenknecht (above), a charismatic firebrand in hard-left politics since the 1990s, broke away from the existing Die Linke party. Her eponymous party finished third in both Thuringia and Saxony, and is now likely to form a part of any coalition government. “The party’s name underlines how much this is a one-woman show, and she has scrambled the landscape,” Deborah said. “You can’t make light of what her party is calling for. On the one hand, it is left wing on economics, calling for higher taxes on the wealthy, for example. But Wagenknecht has also really struck a chord with views that many see as being pro-Russian, or even pro-Putin: she is strongly critical of military aid to Ukraine, and she wants immediate peace talks – which would cement Russia’s existing gains.” Foreign affairs are not part of regional coalition negotiations, of course. “But it’s only a year until the general election,” Deborah noted. “The smart money is on the BSW at least being able to capture the five per cent of the national vote which is the hurdle to representation in parliament. So that means she could be a player in national coalition talks.” Is this just a regional phenomenon? Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, the east of the country has held a distinct political identity of its own. In this excellent analysis, Philip Oltermann writes: “For years, the assumption in Germany has been that once the eastern states had ‘caught up’ with the rest of the country economically, their political outlook would align.” Today, though, the AfD is succeeding even as more people migrate from west to east than are going the other way, with eastern states’ economies growing rapidly. “You don’t see the kind of disparity you used to,” Deborah said. “But the impact of the past is still felt. There are still big demographic differences: for example, a lot more women have left than men.” As early as 2007, Spiegel reported that two thirds of those who had left since 1991 were women, and that the young men who stayed were prime targets for neo-Nazi groups. “A lot of the people with better education and better prospects left too. The AfD have been very good at tapping into a sense of alienation.” Nonetheless, any attempt to dismiss these elections as a local problem should be treated with caution. “In two weeks’ time, we’ll have elections in Brandenburg [the state surrounding Berlin], and while the Social Democrats will do a bit better, we’re probably going to see similar results. This is not just a phenomenon of the east any more.” Will the firewall hold? The mainstream parties have said that they will maintain a brandmauer, or firewall, against the AfD, and refuse to cooperate with them on legislation or include them in coalitions. While the CDU did work with the AfD in Thuringia in 2023 to pass a property tax cut and defeat the minority government, there is little expectation of that norm collapsing now. “You can more or less guarantee that that will be maintained in the foreseeable future,” Deborah said. “They are too far outside the mainstream. They will not enter any central government coalition.” But there are ways that policy can work to the benefit of a party that presents itself as an anti-establishment voice. Meanwhile, even if it won’t work with the AfD, the CDU has been shifting rightwards since Angela Merkel’s retirement, in part because of the threat the AfD poses to its vote share. After a mass stabbing allegedly carried out by a Syrian asylum seeker in the western city of Solingen in August, for example, the CDU demanded that all Afghan and Syrian refugees be stopped at the border before making an asylum claim – in defiance of the German constitution. “Yes, the AfD is going to continue to be excluded from government,” Deborah said. “But there is a strong argument that they are exercising a lot of influence already.” | 