A Brief Look at German State Elections

A very brief and barebone analysis that I will to revist and develop by the end of the year with a specific focus on political exclusion and its effects

The recent victories of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in German state elections have placed the Brandmauer, the political firewall maintained by most other parties against cooperation with the AfD, under increasing strain. What was initially conceived principally as a strategy of political exclusion is becoming equally a question of institutional viability and parliamentary arithmetic.

The 2025 federal election already provided an indication of the changing political landscape. The AfD doubled its share of the second vote from 10.4% in 2021 to 20.8% in 2025, becoming the second-largest party in the Bundestag with 152 seats. Die Linke also increased its representation, winning 8.8% of the second vote and 64 seats, compared with 39 seats in the previous Bundestag.

In Saxony-Anhalt, the Landtag election of 6 September 2026 produced a major electoral advance for the AfD. It secured 39 of the parliament’s 83 seats, compared with 15 for the CDU, leaving the AfD just short of an outright parliamentary majority. The remaining seats were divided between Die Linke, the SPD and the Greens, each with eight, and the BSW with five.

Two weeks later, the AfD again emerged as the largest party in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Preliminary official results gave it 38.2% of the vote and 32 of the Landtag’s 71 seats. The SPD followed with 35.5% and 29 seats, while the CDU received 4.9%, falling below the 5% and consequently losing its representation in the Landtag.

Berlin, however, demonstrated that this fragmentation need not benefit the same political forces uniformly. Die Linke emerged as the largest party in the capital with 25.7% of the vote, while the CDU fell to second place and the AfD received 16.3%. The result leaves a viable parliamentary majority involving Die Linke, the SPD and the Greens provided that substantive disagreements, particularly over housing policy, can be resolved. Taken together, these elections suggest that the challenge facing Germany’s traditional parties extends beyond the growth of the AfD alone. Electoral support is increasingly being redistributed away from the parties that have historically dominated government at federal and state level. The combined capacity of the centrist governing parties to structure coalition formation is consequently diminishing, even where they retain numerical majorities between them.

This fragmentation does not, however, impose equivalent constraints upon all parties. In Berlin, cooperation between Die Linke, the SPD and the Greens is conceivable, even if negotiations between them may prove difficult. The AfD, by contrast, remains excluded from governing coalitions by the stated refusal of the other parliamentary parties to cooperate with it.

A firewall is easy to maintain while the excluded party remains peripheral to the formation of parliamentary majorities. In such a situation, coalition formation can proceed without consideration for such a party. As the AfD’s share of the electorate and parliamentary representation increases, however, maintaining that exclusion requires progressively broader cooperation among parties whose ideological differences might otherwise preclude coalition government.

Coalition compromise is an ordinary feature of parliamentary democracy, and German politics has a long history of governments composed of parties with significant policy differences. Nonetheless, the wider the ideological distance between coalition partners, the more difficult it may become to construct a coherent common programme. Where such coalitions are perceived principally as arrangements designed to prevent another party from governing, dissatisfaction with their performance may itself reinforce support for parties outside the traditional centre. Political fragmentation may therefore become self-reinforcing: the growth of parties outside traditional governing parties complicates the construction of parliamentary majorities, while the increasingly heterogeneous coalitions required to produce those majorities may further weaken the parties participating in them.

These results therefore point less to a uniform shift towards parties outside Germany’s traditional governing coalitions than to a more fragmented and geographically differentiated party system. The immediate institutional consequence is greater pressure on coalition formation, but the extent of that pressure varies substantially between Länder. Whether this represents a durable realignment, however, cannot yet be established. The durability of this fragmentation will depend partly upon developments beyond the party system itself. Prolonged economic weakness and structural pressures may continue to erode support for established governing parties. More consequentially, persistent difficulty in constructing governments may gradually transform an electoral problem into a broader question of institutional legitimacy.