Saxony-Anhalt was once part of the heartland of East Germany. Today it is a German flyover state, with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the Federal Republic. Yet, like our own Mississippi, Saxony-Anhalt has many historical treasures for visitors who explore its small towns and villages. Martin Luther’s church in Wittenberg is in Saxony-Anhalt; the architect Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus Museum is in the small city of Dessau. As the Hitler regime collapsed in 1945, American GIs conquered the state, sweeping to its capital of Magdeburg before pulling back and handing the region over to the Russians. Four decades of communism followed.
Like many Europeans living in rural and small-town regions, Germans in Saxony-Anhalt display authentic conservative instincts. They believe, with good reason, that elites in Berlin and Brussels are out of touch with their cultural values. While their complicated past is checkered by communism and Nazism, Saxony-Anhalters believe they retain a basic right to be proud of their homeland. Of all Germany’s political parties, only the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has connected with those deeply held values. That is a principal reason why the AfD took a landslide 44 percent of the vote in Sunday’s state election.
The AfD’s victory has led to another round of panic for the German ruling class. Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his Christian Democrats (CDU), once Germany’s dominant right-wing political force, are now face-to-face with the reality that they have failed for years to represent authentic conservative values, leaving the field wide open for the AfD to rise and prosper. Although he had an opportunity to take Germany in a new direction, Merz was unwilling to break with the disastrous policies of former Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Berlin elite. Today, he appears to be a political failure. Merz famously boasted that he would cut the AfD’s vote tallies in half. They have doubled since he took office in 2025.
Merz began his chancellorship by ignoring the AfD’s appeal and forming a coalition government with the left-wing Social Democrats (SPD). Unsurprisingly, Merz’s “conservative-socialist” coalition has produced dysfunctional national leadership. Merz has failed to set Germany on a new path on key issues such as energy production, nuclear power, climate policy, taxes and regulation, and, most importantly, immigration. For years, the SPD and Greens, with the CDU’s slow-walk collaboration, have shaped Berlin’s approach to these issues from a left-wing (and often far-left) perspective.
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