Notes on the biggest far right win in Germany since WWII

It's 2026. Our democracies are heading out of the bay - into open ocean. They won't necessarily sink. But compared with the recent past, it will be an unrecognisably rocky ride. Over the weekend, AfD achieved the best result of any far right party in Germany since the Second World War. It won 44% in Saxony-Anhalt, a former East German state of around 2m people. Germany's path here is largely paved by global forces, but inflected by special features of German politics. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Economic exclusion, the untethering of social bonds, the state of the internet, individualistic ideologies of self-realisation, and the unrealisability of a quest for home under conditions of modernity are driving democratic decline across the globe. So far, we have no answer to this. The two available projects are a technocratic centrism ludicrously paralysed by fear of its own demise, and ex-conservative authoritarianism out to break the democratic game. Very importantly, I am not a Germany expert. But Germany experts might weigh in on this: how far is the post-war lesson of 'no experiments' inappropriately conditioning elite psychology, over and above the technocratic habits we see in other democracies? Explainer interlude: what the hell is technocracy anyway? Technocracy substitutes expertise for political contestation across significant areas of policy. It asks citizens to consent to the bypassing of their own consent, because the government knows best. While an impeccable form of governance in high-trust, low-polarisation societies, it is a recipe for democratic self-immolation under our present conditions. More recently, Angela Merkel violated a core principle of sustainable democratic politics: if you are going to take in an enormous number of people, you need civic consent and a social settlement around it first. If you reverse the order, take people in and then seek consent, you shock your democracy. Michael Ignatieff has argued for reframing immigration away from economic calculus and human rights, toward citizens as hosts who may or may not be willing to welcome others into their home as a gift. It was short-sighted of Germany to outsource its energy needs to a fascisising hyper-neoliberal monarchist project in Moscow. And, like the rest of Europe, Germany outsourced its security to the United States, which is now turning into another, milder and still institutionally constrained, hyper-neoliberal monarchist project. And, again, like the rest of Europe, Germany faces a cruel paradox. The more you spend on defence at the expense of other spending, the better protected you will be from Russia - but the more likely you will be to lose your democracy to post-truth authoritarians who share an ideology with the Kremlin. Cartoonishly: what's the point of a Germany led by AfD having a strong army to protect itself against Russia, with which AfD is ideologically allied? As ever with the politics of paradoxes, the answer is to try to have as much of your cake as possible and eat it. But that requires a national project, a clear vision for the country, and a social settlement on how to balance two incompatible necessities. Germany absolutely does not have one. Merz's loosening of the debt brake to fund an increase in defence spending, while simultaneously aiming at welfare cuts, rolls on unbacked by civic consent and risks deepening a legitimacy crisis. Surely, one ray of light is that authoritarian ex-conservatives are terrible at governance and inclined to implode. That's right. But we have to be careful what conclusion we draw from this. Particular instantiations of these movements will collapse. But these movements themselves fail upward. Trumpism will collapse. So will Faragism, if Farage takes power. But that leads not to re-normalisation but to ex-conservative authoritarianism 2.0. The good news is that these transitions may give democracies a window to beat them back, and to practice on authoritarians 1.0 as punchbags before graduating to take on the more serious authoritarianism of wave 2.0. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.