Currently, not everything is going well for populists worldwide. In the United States, as is normal for second-term presidents, the Trump administration is likely to face a bruising midterm election in a few months. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party seems perennially plagued by scandals. On the European continent, the Swedish right, despite a successful record fighting crime, lost power on September 13.
However, all is not doom and gloom for the right in Europe and the United States. On Sunday, September 6, the conservative-nationalist “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) party won the regional elections in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt with 43.8% of the vote. To put this number in perspective, this is the highest percentage of the vote ever won by any party in Saxony-Anhalt since German reunification, and the highest vote share won by the AfD in any state election. These results more than doubled both the percentage of the vote that the AfD won, as well as its seats in the Landtag of Saxony-Anhalt. Additionally, these stellar results were achieved in an election with higher turnout than in any previous Saxony-Anhalt election since unification. The AfD may be poised to form its first government, with the cooperation of the left-populist “Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance” (BSW).
Within Germany, these results have caused a political earthquake. Friedrich Merz, Germany’s establishment-right chancellor, was taken aback by the results, telling a press conference that “We [his party] are all deeply shocked” and that they did not expect it to happen like this.
