AfD Saxony-Anhalt is a racist extremist group, according to the German state's intelligence agency. The party may well trounce its rivals in this weekend's state election.
Page B1From§Eachthe late evening edition — 6 September 2026
THE FIREWALL
Germany's far-right firewall dies in Saxony-Anhalt, two years after the same warning in Saxony and Thuringia.
As it ran on the front
The firewall against Germany's far right died Sunday, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, after two years of test results nobody in Berlin cared to read. It was fatally weakened, not on election night, but on September 2, when Washington's own election-watchers previewed the vote as a referendum on whether the firewall would hold at all — a preview, not a prophecy, though it turned out to be both.
By Sunday evening the exit polls confirmed what the preview had warned: AfD ahead, according to CBS, in a state where the intelligence service itself classifies the party as racist and extremist. The New York Times had the final count by that same evening — AfD short of an outright majority, but only just, the rest of the field trounced so thoroughly that Germany's governing math now runs through a party its own domestic-intelligence agency will not shake hands with. That is not a coalition problem. That is malarkey dressed as one.…
…(cont) By Monday morning Fox News had the obituary line ready-made: a historic victory, a disastrous blow to Chancellor Friedrich Merz's party, the first far-right state government in Germany since World War II within reach. Reach for it AfD did — a two-year reach, if you're counting from the last warning.
The firewall was not surprised by any of this. It had been warned once already. In September 2024, Saxony and Thuringia returned large gains for the same party, and Thuringia handed the far right first place in a state election for the first time since the war ended. That result was covered as news. It should have been covered as a diagnosis.
The firewall is survived by the 2024 returns in Saxony and Thuringia, which predicted it, and by a state intelligence file in Saxony-Anhalt, which will now sit in a filing cabinet next to whatever government forms there. It is preceded in death by nothing, which is the whole point — nobody in mainstream German politics built a replacement while the warning sat in the record for two years, and an unreinforced firewall is a wall in name only.
In lieu of flowers, the mainstream parties of Germany are asked to spend the next two years the way they did not spend the last two: reading the exit polls before they become the front page.
“They built a firewall and left it unstaffed for two years, so don't act shocked when it burns down on schedule. Merz's own party watched Saxony and Thuringia light up in '24 and logged it as weather, not a warning. Now the state that calls these guys extremists in its own file is about to hand them a government, and that's not a coalition, that's a surrender with a swearing-in.”
“Look, a near-majority isn't a majority — the math still holds and coalition-building takes real time. This is voters expressing frustration with the status quo, not extremism — well, that's the state's own intelligence agency's word, not mine. The process is working exactly as designed, which, fine, isn't landing great this week.”
The receipts
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's party faces a disastrous blow as AfD aims for Germany's first far-right state government since World War II.
The Alternative for Germany, or AfD, trounced its rivals but was left unsure if it will be able to govern in Saxony-Anhalt. The result shocked Germany.
· A state election tests Germany’s far-right firewall from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
· Parliamentary elections in the German states of Saxony and Thuringia show large gains for the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany party and the left-wing populist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht par from the morgue, 1 Sep 2024
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.