Episode 142: The AfD and the 2026 State Elections

0:00You're listening to The Zeitgeist, a podcast focused on Germany, the United States, and the transatlantic relationship. Join us as we discuss economics, trade and technology, politics, security, and a lot more. I'm Jeffrey, the president of the American German Institute. Well, it's a great day to have our listeners back with us for a new episode of The Zeitgeist. We are speaking on March 10th, 2026, and I'm glad to have my colleague Eric Langenbacher with me, Eric. Good morning. Good morning on this beautiful spring day. Yes, and we have with us a special guest from Germany, Dr. Wolfgang Muno, Wolfgang. Good afternoon to you, where you are. Thank you for having me. It's nice to be with you. So Wolfgang Muno is the chair of Comparative Politics at the University of Rostock. He has been in the past of visiting fellow here at the Institute.

1:03And what we want to talk about today is the far-right AFD party in Germany, the electoral landscape that is emerging. And what this may tell us about what to expect in the months to come, 2026 being a big election year in Germany at the state level. As people who follow German politics may remember, you have every year, you have a few state elections. This year there are five, and these four are a sort of barometer of sentiment that it gives you a little bit more insight than public opinion polling perhaps. And so today what we want to do is talk a little bit about a state election that happened on Sunday, March 8th. That was in the southwest state of Baden-Vertemberg, a West German state. And extract a few lessons from that and look ahead and see what this tells us about German politics.

2:10So of course Wolfgang at the University of Rostock in kind of a sort of heartland of support for the far-right alternative for Germany party, the AFD. And they have been riding high in opinion polls since last year's election. They did better than ever before in the Bundestag election in 2025. They got just over 20%. Now they are at 25% in most national polls. What do you think accounts for this increase in their support? Well, first of all, I would like to say that the rise of right-wing extremist far-right or right-wing populist parties is of course not a German phenomena. But it happens all over the world at the moment. We see the Rassambulamol national in France, the Justice Party in Poland, Fides in Hungary, Vox and Cheyka in Spain and Portugal.

3:11We see the rise of Maga in the United States. We have seen Boltsunarismo in Brazil. We see Modi in India. And there are some similarities, but there are also some regional specifications. In Germany, for a very long time, we have seen some right parties rising, but then going down, like in the 60s, the NPV was in the state parliaments in Badenburg and Rhineland Palatinate. In the 80s and 90s, we had the Republicana, which was some kind of a far-right Republican party. We've seen in the 2000s the NPV again in Meklenburg, Poman in Saxony, Defaou in Bremen, Saxony Unhaled. So we've seen them rising and going down. So it was kind of a political scientist talked of a normal pathology. So there were some small right-wing parties.

4:12The new thing with the AfD is that the AfD may achieve to unite all the right-wing people, and despite internal disputes, they still follow the party. And they mobilized a lot of voters, especially non-voters, and also they mobilized on very anti-democratic sentiments, I would really say, which we will maybe talk a little bit more in detail. And this led to a normalization of the far-right in Germany, the AfD. It was normal nowadays to say that I'm in favor of the AfD. It wasn't so when I was young, no one would have said I vote for a right-wing extremist or a far-right party that was kind of a taboo in Germany due to the history of especially Western Germany. Nowadays, this has become normal. So we see a normalization, which we also see in electoral results and in polls that the AfD is supported by a lot of people.

5:19And the other thing in the case of the AfD is that on the other side, we see a radicalization of the party. The party has started in 2013. It was founded by three groups, basically, a group of liberal economists who were against the Europeanization, against the euro, especially they wanted the German back. The European group were former Christian Democrats who were disappointed by Angela Merkel and the more centrist way she changed the Christian Democrats, the CDU in Germany. And the third group, at that time, a minority group were right-wing extremists who formerly had been in other right-wing groups. These groups formed the new party, the AfD, and the party radicalized more and more the right-wing extremist wing had become more and more important. And also changed the prochromatic profile from NTU, from a Eurosceptic party to a party who is nowadays extremely xenophobic.

6:24And it's still against the EU, but it's against immigrants and it wants to change democracy in a special way, in a kind of anti-plural, anti-liberal, so that is the party nowadays. And they get the support of quite a big part of the German population. So if I can just jump in for a second, Wolfgang, excellent overview of the evolution of the AfD also in comparison to some of these other right-wing extremist parties. So the big question then is, so what's different this time around? Why is it that the AfD has been able to do what you said, which is to unify all of these disparate right-wing groupings and to get the level of success, the level of support that it's had? We political scientists often talk about the demand side and the supply side, so I think that there's probably explanations on both of those sides here, but I'm interested to hear from you.

7:30Yeah, as I already mentioned, the supply side is the radicalization of the party, and this and there, especially the 2015 event of the so-called immigration crisis in Germany or the refugee crisis in Germany, was a crucial turning point. The party changed to about a more radical xenophobic anti-immigrant position, and this was cheered if we talk about the demand side by many people within the population. So what has changed compared to former right-wing far right parties is that this party started more as a conservative right-wing party, just right of the CDU. And this made it possible for many people to vote for this party. Still, many people would not vote outright for a right-wing extremist party, but in the AfD still, themselves, they never say, as the NPD did, we want to abolish democracy, we are right-wing extremists.

8:33The party says we want to improve democracy. We are conservative. In fact, the party isn't so conservative. It's more right-wing extremists than conservative, and it does not want to improve the democracy, as we know it, it wants to completely change democracy, but that is the image they have transported. And then we had the refugee crisis, which was a trigger point for this party. And we have in recent years more and more crisis, and this crisis raises the fears of many, many people who are keen or who are who vote for the AfD. In political science, we have two basic explanations for voting for the AfD. One is the so-called social economic hypothesis, the term like losers of globalization vote for right-wing populist parties, and the other explanation is a more political cultural explanation, saying that it's kind of a cultural backlash to modernization, to certain to immigration, which is on a very high level.

9:43Especially in Europe, especially in Western Europe, and this has changed societies a lot. In fact, both factors play a role for the election of the, for people to vote for the AfD. We, with some colleagues from Canada and France, I just did an analysis of the GLES data, the German longitudinal election study, which is giving a lot of data in recent years. And from a long-term perspective, we saw that we differentiated between stable voters from the, for the AfD and switched voters for the AfD. And we saw that stable voters who have been voting for the AfD for several times now in the elections, they are mainly motivated by cultural issues. So they are against immigration, against women's rights, they are against diversity. And these people, so the stable voters are mainly motivated by these issues.

10:48And the switch voters, we would say the new voters, more perhaps we can talk about protest voters, they are motivated by social economic issues. They are not really, as we can clearly see, for example, in Biden-Wittenbach, and we should shortly talk about these elections, they are not really motivated by, as losers of globalization, as we would say, because in Germany, there are hardly any real losers of globalization, but they fear the losing their social status. They fear losing their jobs, that's especially in, in Biden-Wittenbach, that has been very present. And they also fear that immigrants might compete in the job market, and that's very problematic. So perceptions matter a lot, and we talk of subjective relative deprivation for the people. They think they might lose, or they think they are losing against others.

11:49And what's especially problematic is they, we call it, anticipated subjective relative deprivation, which means these people still are in a very good situation. Mostly people who have a nice income, workers, and in Biden-Wittenbach, if you are a worker, you earn in the car industry, you might earn even more than university professors, I would say. But these people fear of losing in the future, they might lose their job, all this crisis talk. And the IFA is a party who really is hitting on these fears. It's a party of fear, fear of the future, fear of changes, fear of losing, fear of immigration, which might change the society, fear of rising crimes, although we have less crime rate, lower crime rate than the United States, for example, and less crime than 20 years ago. But they always talk about the fears, and many, many people have these fears, and they are the potential of the RFD.

12:56Yeah. So Wolfgang, you mentioned the Biden-Wittenbach result, and so maybe it's a good time to highlight that, where the AFD had its best ever result in a Western German state. They won 18.8% of the vote, so just under 20% that was about double their results five years earlier, the last state election. So how do you orient that result against this backdrop you've just described of the sources of AFD support, and their growing popularity? Well, Biden-Wittenbach is a very good example for exactly these explanations, and it's basically not one explanation, but it's a mix of these different factors. And we see in Biden-Wittenbach, we see the powerhouse of Germany, as we used to call it. If it would be an independent state, it's so rich, it would be among the 25 wealthiest nations on earth, so around about same level as the whole Belgium or something like that.

14:07So you mean on a per capita basis? On a per capita basis, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, or GDP gross domestic product in Biden-Wittenbach is around roughly the same as the whole Belgium. So people are quite wealthy in this area, but there have been a lot of crisis talks in recent years, so we had the energy crisis after the Ukraine war, we had inflation. And especially there's a lot of fear of crisis in the car industry in Germany. The whole world economy is changing, and the German car industry has become fat and a little bit less innovative than it used to be. So there are a lot of talks about losing jobs. There are different estimations between 50,000 or 150,000 jobs might be lost in the next years in the car industry in Germany, and Biden-Wittenbach is living off that. Bosch is their Mercedes-Benz and other Porsche and other big car companies are in this area.

15:14And so a lot of people fear losing their very well-paid job in the next years, and this is one potential for the RFD. And then we have areas in Biden-Wittenbach, which have always been very conservative. We have a lot of conservative fundamentalist Christians in this region, which is another source of the RFD. And the RFD made a campaign, which was really writing on this fear of losing the job, saying that the government is not able to prevent this. And on the other hand, they also made a campaign of calling for your home and patriotic values. For example, against abortion rights for women, and this is also something which is nice for conservative Christians in the area of Biden-Wittenbach.

16:14So these people come together, let's say as a potential for the RFD. And in the end, they almost, as you said, they almost received 20% of the votes, which is a very, very good result. What we see also in politics is that these people who are queer fear, and they don't, and they are not content with the government anymore. This leads to mistrust in democracy in the end. Just two weeks ago, we had the Deutschland Monitor, the Germany Monitor, giving a survey of all of Germany. And roughly half of the population is still satisfied with democracy as it is in reality, as it works. And this is what we see also in Western states. We will later maybe talk a little bit more on East Germany, where there's even less proportion of the population satisfied with democracy. And in Sachsen-Unhalte, there's about one third of the population satisfied with democracy.

17:19And in Mecklenburg, four per man, less than one quarter, less than 25% of the people are still satisfied with democracy as it works in Germany. So these are people who tend to vote for the RFD. And we see it not only in East Germany, where these factors, the fear of losing, the fear of immigration is just simply higher than in Western states. It's actually higher than in West Germany, but the structural factors are more or less the same. The American German Institute relies on sponsors like you to create this podcast. Visit AmericanGerman.institute-support to learn more about how you can invest in AGI's programs, events, and research building a stronger German-American partnership. Now back to the show. So maybe we should then pivot to talk a little bit more about Eastern Germany. Yes, there is an election coming up in a couple of weeks in Rhineland, Palatinate. But I would assume that the profile of AFD voters is probably similar to that of Baden-Vertenberg.

18:24But the state where you're currently based, Mecklenburg, West, Pomerania, is going to have elections in the fall along with Berlin and Sachsen-Unhalte. So let's talk about the situation in Mecklenburg, West, Pomerania. So if you look at the polls, the AFD has been riding high for quite some time. I think they're about 37%, according to the most recent polling followed by the SPD, which is, of course, the lead party and the current government there, but they're down to 23%. The CDE with 13%, the left 11%, and then the smaller parties, less than that, the FTP barely even registers at 2%. That's another thing from Baden-Vertenberg that they had a really bad night, the FTP, and now all the headlines are, is the party finally done for good kind of thing. But maybe you could tell us about the dynamics in Mecklenburg, West, Pomerania, and why the AFD is so strong there.

19:26And if you think that they will actually come in first, and or even win a majority of these seats. Yeah, yeah, basically, just one sentence or two sentences more in Baden-Vertenberg, the election was highly criticized, no characterized, sorry, was highly characterized by the race between the greens and the Christian Democrats, who will become the next prime minister. And that's very important. The state elections in Germany are highly personalized. So, and that will be the same in two weeks in Rheinland-Pelatinate, where we'll see a race between the social Democrats and the Christian Democrats. So, and this is at the expense of smaller parties. That's why FTP lost the left party lost, and also the social Democrats lost in Baden-Vertenberg, and the AFD is a story on its own in this case. In Mecklenburg for a moment, we will have a race between the prime minister, the incumbent, which is Manuela Schlesich from the social Democrats, and she will run basically against the AFD, the party which is leading at the polls.

20:33In Mecklenburg, Western Pomerania, we have seen more or less the same as we've seen in Baden-Vertenberg, but on a higher level. We have, but Mecklenburg, Western Pomerania is more or less one of the poorer states. Very few industry is there. Many, many people work in tourism sector where there are very low wages. And the average income in Mecklenburg, Western Pomerania is 80% of the German average income. So, the people are poorer, and if you have then an energy crisis after the war and the prices go up, people really fear they cannot pay the rent anymore, they cannot pay the prices for gas or for oil or for gasoline. And also prices for food have been rising in last year's in Germany, a little bit the same, I think the debate is in the United States with the food prices. And people with a low income, they really fear of losing even more. And in East Germany, we have the experience of the unification, which in many families meant that there was no family, which was not hit by unemployment.

21:51Many, many people lost their jobs during unification, all the state enterprises in East Germany were closed. So there are a lot of people who have experience, bad experience of these changes. And that's why they fear even higher the possibility of losing again. They are social status. And in terms of immigration, we have definitely a higher level of xenophobia or fear of immigration. Because we have a history of, yeah, non-experience with immigrants, the German Democrat Republic at 50 years of the closed state and the closed society, there was no immigration, there were some Soviet troops, but they were not allowed to have contact with the population there. There were some migrant workers organized by the state from Angola or from Vietnam, they worked in factories, but they were also not allowed to have contact with the population.

22:52So the East German population never had any contact with immigrants, let's say, with foreigners, with migrants. And this is one crucial hypothesis in social sciences, the contact hypothesis, the more contact you have, the less prejudice, the less fear you have. And in East Germany, we really have a situation with historically no contact. And then we still have a very low level of migrants. The average level of people with migrant background in East Germany is around 5%. In Badenburg, for example, we have an average of 30% of people with migration background. So this is the situation where the IFD with playing on all these fears is even more successful in East Germany than West Germany. And in Michelinburg Corp. as well as in Saxony Unheard, they are leading the polls. And under certain circumstances, small parties don't make it into the parliament with a 5% hurdle.

24:03So it could be if they have a little bit more than 40%, they could even have the majority of seats. I think that's very, that's not very likely that they will get more than 40%. But it's quite likely that they will become in Saxony Unheard and in Michelinburg for the strongest party. What will happen then? Well, actually nothing or not much will happen because they lack coalition partners in a parliamentary system, which we have on the national level as well on the subnational level. You need coalition partners to have a majority and no party wants to join a coalition with the, with the IFD, except one party, which is the. You made a zeitgeist podcast on this party recently and thank you for thank you for noticing. Yeah, yeah, I heard it and the leader of the party, Sarah Wagner, she very often repeats that she is open to cooperation with the AFD. So what could happen in Michelinburg Corp. is that the AFD will be the strongest party, not having a majority.

25:17But the BSW could tolerate minority government or may even cooperate with the IFD. That is a possibility. More probably will be a three party cooperation somehow between social Democrats, the left party and the Christian Democrats, which is in its own problematic because the Christian Democrats don't want to cooperate with the left party. But we will see if they are doing that somehow in Turingia yet and there might be also some kind of cooperation, not a formal coalition, but maybe kind of a cooperation with between the three parties or possibility number three. We've seen in buttonback that until the last day, there will be a lot of changes and it's especially about the personalization who will become Prime Minister and Manuela Shreze, the Prime Minister in Michelinburg, Western Pomerania, she is very well known and she is quite popular in the region.

26:22So the social Democrats could make more percentage points in the upcoming election. We still have a few months to go in the campaign. So Wolfgang, if I can just jump in and I see that we are going to be running out of time very soon as well. There seems to be this tendency when I listen to the pundits or even other political scientists to just think that the AFD is this ever strengthening strong party that is such a danger to so much. But what about some kind of inner vulnerabilities? So for instance, there have been quite a few scandals being reported about what the Germans would call Feten Vyacheshov, but we would call nepotism with family members of AFD deputies being employed by other AFD members. And I mean, this is pretty scandalous especially because the AFD loves to talk about all the corruption in the mainstream parties, the Democratic parties. So do you think that these scandals, these nepotism scandals are going to have any effect on their level of support? And what about other kind of like inner tensions?

27:31So I heard that in Mecklenburg, West Pomerania, there are different factions with the AFD based in different cities. So how is that going to affect things or will it? Well, unfortunately, up to now we have seen many, many scandals within the AFD and many tensions within the AFD. There have been some members of parliament of the European parliament related to corruption or espionage for China and Russia, but this didn't affect the vote for the AFD so far. So and internal tensions, there is no party group in the state where there are no, where there's no invite between different factions, but and this is contrary to former far right parties, this has not affected the vote for the AFD so far. And I think or I might expect that the current nepotism scandal in the AFD might affect a few people.

28:38Not to vote for the AFD because this is their motive, their theme, we are not corrupt, we are against the corrupt elite. So this might have effects, some effects, but not to a large extent. What we have seen recently now and also in Badenburg is that more and more people vote for the AFD. First of all, because they are convinced of the party, they are not protest voters anymore, more than half of the voters clearly said in Badenburg, we think that this is a good party and they have a good program. This is one point and the other point is what we have seen also in Badenburg in the election is they had a very weak candidate. He was not even on the list. Markus von Meyer, he was also in the end of the campaign, he was in the United States and not in Badenburg back, but still the AFD received the votes. So all the invites might affect a little bit, but not substantially.

29:43We have to keep in mind that this is a party who has ousted several party leaders in the last years, they have ousted three party leaders in a row, more or less. One of the founders, Fragur Patri and Jörg Moiden has left the party because of the radicalization, and this would harm any party in Germany so far, but not the AFD. So this is a new thing, which for scientists also why it doesn't affect the people, most of the sympathizers supporters of the AFD, they simply do not believe what the media tells them they believe they live in their own bubble, we would say social media bubble media bubble and believe the explanations of the AFD and the most problematic thing is this is legal in Germany what they are doing. There's a debate now of changing the law for parliamentarians not to pay, let's say, relatives from other parliamentarians and this is the cross cross networking payments what they did.

30:49And this has to change and then we will see what will happen to the AFD and one thing which in the end, maybe which was also good for the AFD and maybe bad for democracy. That court recently decided that the AFD should not be called by the agency for the protection of the Constitution as a outstanding right wing extremist party. So this may counterbalance the effect of the nepotism that some people say if this party is not right wing extremist, I can vote for it and others might say if this is so corrupt this party, then I won't vote for the party. So so far, this is balancing. Yeah. Wolfgang, this has been a great conversation and I can't resist the temptation to ask one last question because you highlighted two things that I thought were quite important. First, that the AFD is unlikely to win an absolute majority in Mecklenburg or in Saxony on hot.

31:53But there is the possibility of a coalition with the with the Saravagen Connect party, BSW. What would it mean if you had a minister president, a state governor from the AFD in what ways would this disrupt German politics as a whole or would it not? I would say it would not on the national level, it would, there would be limited influence because the government would have only three votes or one state Mecklenburg or Saxony, they would have three votes out of 69 in the Bundesrat and the second chamber. So this is very limited, they couldn't block anything and they could try to initiate legislation, but they wouldn't find majorities. But it would have a have a big impact, of course, in the state. The state competences are justice, so they could nominate judges, it's police, they could change the police, they could nominate police chiefs from which what they would want to and it's media, they could try to to get out of the public media system.

33:13But most importantly, from my perspective is education is competence of the states and they could change the schools and also the universities basically to a certain extent, but especially in the school, they could change the teaching system, they could change what would students be taught in that sense, especially in history and social studies and in other very in other areas which might have an impact then in upcoming years, if the younger generation would grow up in a state where a government of AfD would tell them that the Nazi government was not so bad, it was just a short episode and let's forget about Jews and immigrants. And also they already said in Saxony, the head will receive one said we want to make this region as unattractive as possible for immigrants, which would influence also the economic development because no immigrants, Germany economy wouldn't run anymore, there wouldn't be any people in hospitals, not enough people in hospitals and in other areas to work for and this would have a strong impact on the subnational on the state level.

34:32But the very limited impact on the on the national level, unless there would be more governments of the AfD, then of course they could influence the national level. Right, right. OK, well, we will put a bookmark there because I'm sure we will come back to this topic as we look ahead to the elections in September in in Mecklenburg and in Saxony on halt. So, but let's pause there Wolfgang, thank you for sharing these these really helpful insights into the dynamics around the AfD, not only in the West, but also in the East. And thanks for being with us and we look forward to coming back to you sometime soon to talk further. Of course it's been a pleasure and thank you for having me and I would love to be again with you. OK, and for all of our listeners, I would also refer you to our project, which we call understanding the AfD.

35:32You can find that on our website with a whole compilation of all of the research and events and discussions that AGI has organized around the support for the AfD trying to understand its sources and its its trajectory. So, and with that, we look forward to having all of you listeners with us again on the next episode of the Zeitgeist. Thanks for listening to the Zeitgeist, a podcast produced by the American German Institute. Send us your feedback by email to info at aicgs.org or on social media at AMGRINST. For more information on today's episode and research on the German-American relationship, visit our website at americanjerman.institute.