The Rise of Germany’s Far Right Reflects a Systemic Crisis

By
Gábor Scheiring

Pundits have widely explained the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in terms of cultural backlash or the eastern German psyche. Yet its rise is no passing disturbance but a symptom of a much deeper crisis in Europe’s social model.

AfD supporters at an election watch party Magdeburg, Germany, do a selfie just before initial results showed the party with 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt state elections on September 6, 2026.

The rise of the Alternative für Deutschland is the product of a long erosion of Germany’s social-market compromise. Calls to simply defend the tattered status quo risk letting the far-right party misrepresent itself as the sole force for change. (Sean Gallup / Getty Images)

After the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) scored 44 percent of the vote in the September 6 state election in Saxony-Anhalt, many analysts sought some single, clearly identifiable reason. The interest in the AfD’s success is well justified: what happens in Germany shapes Europe and even world politics, and most mainstream accounts seek tools with which the center can disarm the far right. In this vein, the AfD’s success is said to owe to a sluggish bureaucracy, the peculiar political culture of the former East Germany, or more simply to immigration.

Yet the reliance on a single explanatory factor yields single-variable strategies in response, and such strategies are bound to fail. The rise of the far right is a symptom of a systemic crisis that has merely become more visible in eastern Germany than elsewhere.

Institutions, National Character, and Subcultures

One rather unconvincing group of explanations focuses on the peculiarities of national institutions. In the German case, conservative commentators often bewail a slow and frustrating bureaucracy — and it is indeed notoriously sluggish. The morning after the Saxony-Anhalt election, one of Germany’s largest news portals blamed the “sprawling bureaucratic state” for the growth of political dissatisfaction, and prescribed trimming it as the remedy.

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