How Germany's Far Right Plans to Govern Its Way Into Power

The Experiment Begins in Merseburg

There is a town in eastern Germany called Merseburg where thousands of supporters cheered as Ulrich Siegmund promised them they were making history. He told them to look ahead twenty or thirty years and say: It began here. In 2026. In Saxony-Anhalt.

Siegmund is a former perfume salesman turned politician, the face of the AfD in this small state of two million people. His smile draws selfies and loyalty. What the crowd at Merseburg may not grasp — or chooses not to — is that their applause is part of something far larger than a regional election on September 6.

The AfD has spent years building toward this moment. If the party wins an absolute majority in Saxony-Anhalt, it will hold governing power in Germany for the first time since the Second World War. But more importantly, it will have a laboratory.

This is not an accident. It is a strategy, and it is being executed with a level of preparation that would surprise even seasoned observers of German politics.

The Civil Service Gambit

The most consequential element of the AfD’s plan has nothing to do with rhetoric. It is happening in the quiet spaces of bureaucracy.

Last year, the party established what it calls the Black-Red-Gold Academy — named for the German flag — to train and place loyalists in up to 200 civil service positions across Saxony-Anhalt’s state administration. Candidates have been pre-selected from across Germany and sent to Magdeburg. The focus is concentrated in the interior and finance ministries, the departments where policy actually gets implemented.

Postwar Germany was built on the principle of an apolitical civil service, a firewall against the kind of political coercion that brought the Nazis to power. The AfD is now testing whether that firewall can be breached from the inside without breaking the law.

Andreas Lichert, an AfD lawmaker from Hesse, called it a restructuring process. The blunt logic is simple: you cannot fire career civil servants, but you can allocate resources in ways that neutralize opposition. Those who will not comply can be transferred, starved of influence, worn down until they leave.

Sven Schulze, the current CDU premier of Saxony-Anhalt, warned that the plan amounts to a purge disguised as administration. He said every civil servant who does not follow AfD directives would face harassment, transfer, or pressure to resign. The accusation is stark. The mechanism is real.

Learning From Vienna

The playbook did not originate in Germany.

Earlier this year, Siegmund and other AfD leaders traveled to Salzburg to meet with officials from Austria’s Freedom Party, the FPÖ. The FPÖ has governed at both federal and state level for decades and understands the mechanics of far-right administration better than any other party in Europe. Hubert Fuchs, a former state secretary in Austria’s finance ministry, briefed AfD candidates in Berlin on how to manage civil services and how to persuade other parties to govern alongside them.

The lesson from Austria is clear: legitimacy comes from competence, not chaos. The FPÖ stayed in power by showing voters that the sky does not fall when the far right runs a ministry. The AfD wants the same proof.

That is why the party’s 100-day program mixes radical proposals with bureaucratic mundanity. Yes, there are plans to cut funding to state broadcasters, to redo school history lessons to reduce emphasis on Nazi crimes, to slash money for art deemed anti-German. But there are also plans to increase fire department funding on highways. The combination is deliberate.

Götz Frömming, a leader of the AfD’s election programming division in Berlin, said it plainly. If the party can govern successfully in Saxony-Anhalt, citizens will see that things might even get better. That is the destigmatization strategy.

The Trump Shadow

The AfD is acutely aware of what happens when far-right governance turns ugly.

Gordon Köhler, an AfD politician from Saxony-Anhalt, said the party wants to avoid the kind of fever-pitch polarization that followed Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency. The party seeks swift action on asylum crackdowns without the images of street violence that accompanied U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.

A tension runs through the strategy. The party wants to govern radically while appearing stable. It wants to transform Germany while convincing ordinary citizens that nothing has changed.

This balancing act is the core challenge. Siegmund’s celebrity-like appeal masks an extremist branch — domestic intelligence authorities have designated the AfD Saxony-Anhalt as an extremist organization including former members of a banned group modeled on the Hitler Youth. The party’s radical edge is real. The question is whether it can be sheathed long enough to survive governing.

What Berlin Will Do

Mainstream parties are already preparing countermeasures.

There are discussions about blocking an AfD interior minister from national security meetings, particularly those involving intelligence on Russia. The fear is that Moscow-friendly AfD officials could leak classified information to the Kremlin. There are also proposals to cut federal funding to Saxony-Anhalt through the fiscal equalization system — €2.8 billion in 2025 — on rule-of-law grounds, though legal hurdles are significant.

The AfD has a Working Group on Government Participation drafting legislation and preparing legal defenses against obstruction. Martin Reichardt, the party’s state leader, said the legal department is ready to fight attempts to block the government’s work.

This sets up a confrontation unlike anything Germany has seen since the postwar era. It is not just a policy dispute. It is a test of whether the democratic order can contain a party that has won its way into power democratically and now intends to use that power to change the system from within.

The National Stakes

The consequences extend far beyond Saxony-Anhalt.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU has maintained a cordon sanitaire against the AfD for years. If the party proves it can govern in Saxony-Anhalt without collapsing into chaos or tyranny, that firewall becomes harder to justify. Voters who currently hesitate may find their reservations松动.

The transnational implications are equally significant. Germany is the economic and political anchor of the European Union. A far-right government in Berlin — even a future one, seeded by success in Magdeburg — would reshape Europe’s stance on Russia, on migration, on NATO, on the rules-based order itself.

The AfD knows this. That is why Siegmund told his supporters in Merseburg to look ahead to the history books. The party is not just running for power in a small eastern state. It is planting a flag.

Whether the experiment succeeds or fails, the fact that it is being conducted with such preparation marks a shift in European politics. The far right is no longer content with protest. It wants to govern. And Germany, the continent’s largest democracy, is the prize.