AfDs Germany Win Exposes a Quiet Transatlantic Right Alliance
The AfD's stunning victory in Saxony-Anhalt isn't just a German problem — it's a signal that European and American right movements are converging in ways Washington's establishment still refuses to name. Trump's open praise for the result tells you everything.
The Number That Should Terrify Berlin
AfD won 43.8 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6. That is not a protest haul. It is not a one-off grievance spike. It represents a 23-point jump from the 21 percent the party captured in 2021 — a rate of growth that no German mainstream party has ever matched going forward.
Meanwhile, Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union collapsed from 37.1 percent to 17.2 percent. The CDU did not merely lose ground. It was knocked off first place by the very party its founders spent decades building coalitions to contain.
The partial result gives AfD 39 of 84 seats — not a governing majority, but close enough. More importantly, the left-wing BSW bloc, led by the renegade SPD defector Sahra Wagenknecht, picked up five seats and has already floated the possibility of cooperation. That math produces an AfD-led government in Saxony-Anhalt, and likely before the federal election next year forces the calculus on every other state capital.
What Markets Got Wrong — and Right
Merz warned on August 30 that an AfD victory would chase foreign investment out of the state. On September 7, European financial markets barely blinked. German bonds dipped slightly. European equities held flat.
That silence is itself a story. Investors may be pricing in the reality that AfD is no longer a pariah — or they may be underestimating what happens when a far-right party controls a state budget, a police apparatus, and a ministry responsible for welcoming foreign firms.
AfD was founded on opposition to the euro during the European debt crisis. Its core ideology champions smaller government, and in a country exhausted by inflation and stagnation, the argument that right-wing populism might at least discipline spending has traction among some business observers. The line you hear in Munich and Frankfurt: better AfD than a liberal coalition that hands out subsidies indefinitely.
It is a fragile logic. But it explains why the markets shrugged while Merz’s warning went unanswered.
The Italian Preview
Italy offers a road map that Europe’s center has been slow to absorb. Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia shares AfD’s hardline stance on illegal immigration. When she took office in October 2022, investors and allies feared instability. Instead, she governs pragmatically within the EU framework, her coalition delivers, and her string of days in power hit 1,413 on September 4 — the longest continuous tenure for an Italian prime minister since the Second World War.
Meloni’s normalization has cooled the reflexive rejection of far-right parties across the continent. If Italy proves survivable, Germany becomes imaginable. And that imagination is what is moving through Saxony-Anhalt’s polling stations.
The Trump Connection That Changes Everything
Here is what the German press coverage largely sidesteps: Donald Trump has publicly praised AfD’s electoral gains. He did not frame it as a domestic German concern. He framed it as a victory for his side of a transatlantic movement.
That is the non-obvious implication of this election. AfD’s surge is not happening in isolation. It is the European face of a broader realignment that Trump’s campaign — and his incumbency if he returns to the White House — actively encourages. Every praise tweet, every Rally appearance, every policy proposal that signals distance from NATO commitment and EU cohesion strengthens the case AfD politicians make at home.
The alignment is quiet because Washington’s establishment does not want to name it. Calling it an alliance would force a reckoning in Berlin, Brussels, and Paris. Better to treat AfD as an aberration and wait it out.
But aberrations do not gain 23 percentage points in four years.
Who Wins, Who Loses
AfD wins control of a strategic eastern state and a platform to prove that governing with their agenda is possible. BSW wins leverage without paying the pariah tax. The CDU wins nothing but a demonstration that its post-Merkel identity crisis is deepening.
Foreign investors in Saxony-Anhalt lose certainty. The EU loses a member state where a far-right party now controls policy levers. The German labor movement loses another stronghold in the east, where deindustrialization and demographic decline made AfD’s messaging resonate long before this election.
Trump wins a confirmation that his strategy of empowering allied movements abroad is working. European center parties lose proof that containment no longer functions as a strategy.
What Happens Next
Saxony-Anhalt’s parliament must now form a government. AfD will test whether BSW cooperation is serious or tactical. If a coalition holds, Berlin will watch closely — because Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia all have AfD electorates waiting.
Federal elections are due by autumn 2025. If AfD consolidates at 40 percent or beyond nationally, the question shifts from whether they govern to whether the CDU can survive beside them without collapsing further. If they stall, the lesson for Merz is still painful: his party lost nearly 20 points without winning a single argument.
Markets will keep pricing in uncertainty. Some investors will leave. Others will stay and bet on the Meloni outcome — that a right-wing government proves manageable.
The transatlantic dimension is the piece most English-language observers miss. This is not only a German story. It is a signal flare from a political current that Trump is channeling and AfD is answering. The question for Washington is whether it recognizes what it has helped create — or whether it will keep treating European far-right gains as someone else’s problem until they are impossible to ignore.