Germany’s far-right AfD is poised for power – and split on whether to cozy up to Trump

AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt Gambit: What a Far-Right State Government Would Mean for Germany and Its Washington Ties

Sandego.net – Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt could hand the Alternative for Germany its most consequential victory yet: an outright parliamentary majority that would install a far-right government in a German state for the first time since the end of World War II. Polling firm Infratest dimap projects the AfD at roughly 42 percent of the vote in the eastern state, a figure that dwarfs its support levels from just a few years earlier and, if realized, would be sufficient to govern under Germany’s proportional-representation system without needing coalition partners.

The stakes extend well beyond one state’s cabinet. A clean AfD majority in Saxony-Anhalt would shatter the informal but deeply entrenched convention that has kept the party locked out of executive power since its post-2017 surge. It would also force every other party in the country to confront, in practice rather than in theory, whether their collective refusal to share government with the AfD still holds.

The Firewall and the Extremist Label

German domestic intelligence agencies have formally designated the AfD as an “extremist” party, a classification rooted in what officials describe as the party’s rhetoric toward Muslim citizens and its stance on immigration. Mainstream conservatives and left-leaning progressives alike have publicly denounced the AfD, and every other parliamentary party operates under an unwritten norm — commonly called the “firewall” — that bars coalition talks or sustained parliamentary cooperation with the party.

That isolation is precisely what makes Sunday’s result so consequential. Should the AfD fall short of an absolute majority, the remaining parties could assemble a patchwork coalition specifically designed to exclude the AfD from governing. The alternative — a standalone AfD administration — would represent a structural break in postwar German politics.

Washington Courtship: From Munich to the Inauguration

Partly in response to that domestic quarantine, the AfD has cultivated visible links with the American MAGA movement. The connections run deeper than shared branding, though the branding itself is unmistakable: caps reading “Make Germany Great Again” have become a fixture at AfD rallies.

Party co-leader Alice Weidel met US Vice President JD Vance on the margins of last year’s Munich Security Conference. Earlier, she appeared alongside Elon Musk in a livestreamed event on his social platform, X. A small delegation of AfD parliamentarians also traveled to Washington to attend President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

The relationship has not been one-directional. Vance used his 2025 address in Munich to press German lawmakers to dismantle their firewall against the far-right. Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly criticized German authorities for formally labelling the AfD extremist, describing the decision as “tyranny in disguise.”

A Fracture Line: Trump’s Foreign Policy and the AfD’s Unease

Yet the alignment between the two movements is not uniform. As Trump’s administration has pursued a war in Iran, engaged in what observers describe as saber-rattling over Greenland, and intervened in Venezuela, factions within the AfD have begun signaling a desire to keep distance from those moves. The German public’s tolerance for such interventions has proven thin.

A March poll conducted by Germany’s public broadcaster ARD found that 58 percent of respondents regarded the strikes on Iran as unjustified. A separate ARD survey in January showed that 72 percent considered the arrest of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro unjustified. These figures suggest that any AfD government openly endorsing Trump’s foreign-policy agenda would face a domestic legitimacy problem.

“I think there is ideological alignment on key issues, and I think the AfD is also learning from the MAGA movement,” said Almut Möller, director for European and global affairs at the European Policy Centre, a Brussels-based think tank.

Möller noted that the two movements converge most sharply on what she described as the imperative to “care about (its) own people and stop caring about everybody else.” She cautioned, however, that the relationship is far from simple.

“Having said that, it is not a straightforward relationship to handle at all times,” Möller told CNN, particularly when it comes to “policies that affect the German economy,” such as the Trump tariffs or pain at the gas pump amid the Iran war.

Against that backdrop, AfD leadership has oscillated between praising Trump’s domestic positions on immigration, culture-war issues, and nationalism while criticizing his interventions abroad. The party’s foreign-policy spokesperson, Markus Frohnmaier, told CNN that he has made multiple trips to the United States this year and has built strong personal links within the MAGA orbit. Speaking in his Bundestag office days before the Saxony-Anhalt vote, Frohnmaier stressed the overlap on immigration above all.

“Remigration” and the Domestic Agenda

The AfD’s campaign platform in Saxony-Anhalt centers on what the party and its allies term “remigration”: large-scale deportation of migrants and refugees, paired with the expansion of mass detention facilities. Party officials have repeatedly deployed anti-Muslim rhetoric and have specifically named Muslim and Ukrainian residents when describing whom they intend to send abroad. Another pledge is to create separate school tracks, a proposal that critics argue would institutionalize segregation along ethnic and religious lines.

If the AfD converts its polling lead into a governing mandate, those pledges move from campaign rhetoric to administrative reality within weeks. The question for the rest of Germany — and for Washington, which has invested political capital in the relationship — is whether the party’s internal split over Trump’s foreign policy will resolve into a coherent governing doctrine or remain a source of friction that complicates both domestic governance and transatlantic coordination.

Whatever the final tally in Saxony-Anhalt, the election will mark a turning point. The firewall, the extremist designation, and the informal norms that have contained the AfD since its rise will face their most direct test yet. And the party’s entanglement with American right-wing politics, once a matter of shared slogans and occasional photo-ops, now carries the weight of potential state-level governance.