Particularly alarming to observers is the AfD's growing strength in former East German states, where the party now regularly polls above 30% and has already secured governing coalitions in several municipal governments. In Saxony and Thuringia, AfD candidates have won mayoral races in mid-sized cities, breaking the cordon sanitaire that mainstream parties had maintained around the far-right.

The party's increasingly radical rhetoric has prompted Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, to place several state-level AfD chapters under formal surveillance as suspected extremist organizations. The designation—which applies to AfD organizations in Saxony, Thuringia, and Saxony-Anhalt—allows intelligence services to monitor party communications and activities.

Yet surveillance has done little to stem the party's growth. AfD leaders have successfully portrayed government monitoring as proof of establishment persecution, a narrative that resonates with supporters who view mainstream media and political institutions as fundamentally corrupt or hostile to "ordinary Germans."

The European dimension adds another layer of concern. The AfD sits in the European Parliament's Identity and Democracy group alongside France's National Rally, Italy's League, and other far-right parties that have collectively normalized previously taboo positions on immigration, national sovereignty, and European integration. What was once marginal has become mainstream across much of the continent.

Germany's mainstream parties face an acute dilemma. The traditional "grand coalition" approach—where CDU and SPD govern together to exclude extremists—has been employed repeatedly since 2005 but has arguably accelerated voter disaffection by blurring distinctions between center-right and center-left. Meanwhile, the more explicitly progressive positions of the Green Party alienate socially conservative voters, many of whom have migrated to the AfD.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose SPD currently leads a fragile coalition with the Greens and liberal Free Democrats, has called the AfD's rise "the greatest threat to German democracy in the postwar era" but has struggled to articulate an effective response beyond vague appeals to democratic values and historical memory.

Having reported from Berlin during the 2017 federal elections—when the AfD first entered the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote—the current moment feels qualitatively different. What was then treated as a protest vote has hardened into durable electoral support. The party has professionalized its operations, moderated its most inflammatory rhetoric just enough to maintain plausible deniability, and successfully positioned itself as the voice of Germans who feel left behind by globalization, immigration, and cultural change.

Whether Germany's democratic institutions and political culture can withstand this challenge remains an open question. The Federal Republic was intentionally designed with safeguards against extremism—a 5% threshold for parliamentary representation, robust constitutional protections, and mechanisms to ban anti-democratic parties. But those safeguards were built for an era when far-right extremism was politically marginal, not polling at nearly a quarter of the electorate. The coming months will test whether those mechanisms remain adequate for the challenges of 2026.

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