Germany's AfD speakership win tests Merz's extremism pledge

A Postwar Line Crossed

In Magdeburg, Germany watched a boundary dissolve. Tobias Rausch, a lawmaker for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), was elected president of the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament on Tuesday. The vote was secret, the result inevitable, and the symbolism seismic. For the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949, a far-right party holds the gavel of a German state legislature.

The mathematics behind the win tell the story of a mainstream that has fractured. The AfD took the most seats in Saxony-Anhalt’s September 6 election but fell three short of an absolute majority. To form a government, it needed partners. Rather than court the Christian Democrats (CDU) or the Social Democrats (SPD)—both of whom maintain an unyielding “cordon sanitaire” against the AfD—the right-wing populists turned to the Left Party’s ten deputies. A cross-flank alliance, unthinkable a decade ago, now commands the chamber.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz responded with a blunt moral indictment. “Anyone who casts their vote for the AfD is playing the extremists’ game and undermining credibility,” he said at a Berlin event on Wednesday. “In any case, this is incompatible with the values of my party.”

The language was familiar. What was not was the context. Merz is not declaring a principle from a position of strength. He is declaring it from the bottom of the polls.

The Approval Trench

A survey by public broadcaster ARD released earlier this month found only one in ten Germans satisfied or very satisfied with Merz’s performance. It is the lowest chancellor-rating figure recorded since the survey began in 1997. His governing coalition—a fragile “traffic light” alliance of SPD, Greens, and FDP—looks increasingly brittle. The CDU, his own party, is already polling ahead nationally, waiting for the next electoral test.

That test arrives sooner than expected. Saxony-Anhalt was a loss; Berlin was a rout. On September 20, the Left Party doubled its previous score in the capital, propelled by a housing crisis so acute it became the sole issue of the campaign. Lead candidate Elif Eralp, the daughter of Turkish parents who fled the 1980 coup, promised to nationalize private housing associations—a move backed by a 2021 referendum in which 58 percent of voters approved. Eralp is poised to become Berlin’s first Left Party mayor, a result that stings twice: it removes a red-majority city from the coalition’s grip and hands a platform to a party Merz has long treated as part of the extremist spectrum.

Merz’s “extremism” framing now has to cover both ends of the political aisle simultaneously. The CDU’s traditional enemy is the AfD; the governing SPD’s enemy is often the Left. Merz is attempting to collapse both distinctions into a single binary: loyal to the liberal democratic order, or outside it. The votes in Magdeburg and Berlin suggest that binary is losing its descriptive power.

The Coalition Calculus

What does this mean for the federal election, due by autumn 2025? The arithmetic is unforgiving.

If the AfD continues its ascent—and many surveys place it within two points of the CDU—Merz faces a stark choice. He can try to isolate the AfD entirely, betting that a future grand coalition with the SPD or even a center-right pact with the Liberals can still deliver a majority. Or he can begin the slow, dangerous work of distinguishing between the AfD’s electoral wing and its more extremist factions, testing whether the cordon can be bent without breaking.

Neither path is easy. The first requires the CDU to accept a prolonged period in opposition, a painful prospect given its current polling lead. The second risks legitimizing a party that has been convicted of using hate speech and whose internal security services consider parts of it a verified right-wing extremist threat. Merz’s Wednesday remarks were clear: no coalition with the AfD. “Anyone who votes for the AfD is playing the extremists’ game” is not language that leaves room for parliamentary cooperation.

But the deeper question is whether Merz can govern with the tools at his disposal. The Left Party’s win in Berlin demonstrates that anti-establishment sentiment is not the exclusive property of the far right. Housing costs, which have surged by nearly 30 percent in German cities over the past five years, are a unifying grievance. Eralp’s campaign tapped a reservoir of discontent that stretches across the political spectrum—a discontent that Merz’s CDU has struggled to address beyond generic promises of economic stability.

The European Echo

Saxony-Anhalt’s new parliament president did not win in a vacuum. The AfD’s breakthrough mirrors a wider rightward drift across Europe: similar gains in France, the Netherlands, and Italy have reshaped the continental center of gravity. Yet Germany’s case is distinct because of the postwar taboo. The cordon sanitaire was never just a political tactic; it was a constitutional commitment, a guardrail against the historical recurrence of extremist governance.

When that guardrail is crossed—not by a federal law, but by a state parliament speaker—it forces a reckoning. Merz’s pledge to fight extremism is now less a rhetorical stance than a operational problem. How do you fight a movement that has mastered the electoral process without handing it the instruments of state?

The answer may lie in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, where voters head to the polls in April. A Left Party or AfD gain there would signal that the current trajectory is accelerating. A CDU recovery would suggest the cordon can still hold—if only barely.

Until then, Merz’s approval rating of 10 percent will remain a quiet indictment. He has declared war on extremism. But in a country where both the far right and the far left are translating voter frustration into seats, the chancellor’s own political survival may depend on proving that the center can still deliver.