Sunday, September 7, 2026. Saxony-Anhalt state election. According to CNBC-reported exit polls, the Alternative für Deutschland party took 44.4 percent of the vote, putting Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives in the rearview mirror at only 18.3 percent. No far-right party has come this close to running a German state on its own since 1945. Zoom out to the national election, and it’s the same story on a bigger stage: AfD is polling around 28 percent nationally. Comfortably first, with the CDU trailing behind by seven or eight points. This change isn’t a blip. This didn’t come out of nowhere. AfD has been gaining ground for years, and now it’s worth asking what the party would actually do with power. What They’d Do in Office Alternative für Deutschland’s economic agenda is a good place to start: the party mixes tax cuts and deregulation with a heavy dose of economic nationalism. It is marketed as protecting German industry from both Brussels and global competition. Regarding energy, the platform seeks a near-total reversal of the last decade of German climate policy: keep gas and coal plants running, restart mothballed nuclear reactors, scrap the CO2 levy, and end renewable subsidies. Alice Weidel has outright said that she’d tear down wind turbines to cut grid fees. The party also wants Germany out of the Paris climate agreement entirely. Not only that, its 2025 federal manifesto calls for immediately lifting sanctions on Moscow, and repairing the Nord Stream pipelines to restart cheap Russian gas imports. Russia is not a side issue here. On foreign policy, AfD has moved from garden-variety Euroskepticism to something more drastic: the manifesto argues that if Germany has to pick a side, it should leave both the EU and NATO, and instead align with Russia’s political and economic bloc. Additionally, they want Ukraine kept permanently outside both institutions as a neutral buffer state. That’s not a fringe faction talking. That’s the federal platform. On social policy, the Alternative für Deutschland party explicitly opposes state action on LGBTQ+ equality, and is skeptical of same-sex marriage. They branded the anti-discrimination policy as “gender ideology”, and said they want it stripped out of schools and public life alike. A direct break from decades of cross-party consensus, the party’s official platform states plainly that “Islam does not belong to Germany,”. Additionally, its immigration platform goes beyond asylum limits to include ending refugee spending, mass repatriation, and stripping the right to claim asylum in Germany altogether. Less attention gets paid to the party’s institutional agenda. Critics and researchers tracking the party note AfD rhetoric that includes expanding police powers, restricting press freedom, and questioning judicial independence, alongside expressed admiration for authoritarian leaders abroad. In Saxony-Anhalt specifically, the party’s candidates have vowed to rewrite the state’s history curriculum to shift emphasis away from the Nazi era and toward the century before it, and to pull the state out of its regional public broadcaster altogether. This is a deeply concerning, direct shot at one of the few remaining ways far-right agendas are kept in check. Who’s Actually Running This Thing The AfD party began with Björn Höcke, the head of AfD’s Thuringia branch and the informal leader of its hardest-line faction. German courts have convicted him twice for using the phrase “Alles für Deutschland,” a slogan lifted straight from the Nazi SA. He’s paid fines both times and kept his job. This isn’t a rogue backbencher; Höcke sets the tone for a huge chunk of the party’s eastern base: the same base that just delivered Saxony-Anhalt. Then there’s the party’s legal status: Germany’s domestic intelligence service classified the entire AfD as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization in May 2025. A court provisionally blocked a designation in February 2026, while the party’s lawsuit against it proceeds. That tells you the label landed somewhere it doesn’t want to be. ‘Remigration’ has become one of the party’s most controversial buzzwords. It is a shorthand in some party circles for mass deportation extending beyond undocumented migrants. This reportedly came out of a 2023 meeting in Potsdam, where AfD figures met with identitarian activists to discuss pushing out immigrants, including some holding German citizenship. When it became public, close to a million people marched in protest across German cities. That crowd size demonstrates how strongly Germans heard and disagreed with this plan. The Billionaire in the Group Chat This story cannot be told without mentioning Elon Musk; he’s called AfD “the last ray of hope” for Germany in a column for Welt am Sonntag. Musk even joined a live online chat with co-leader Alice Weidel to tell Germans to get behind the party, “or things are going to get very, very much worse.” Chancellor Olaf Scholz publicly pushed back, saying free speech “also means you can say things that are not right and do not contain good political advice,”. U.S. lawmakers across the aisle even called the endorsement unnatural. Alternative für Deutschland’s connections to parties like France’s National Rally and Hungary’s Fidesz exist, but stay at arm’s length. AfD remains politically toxic, even within Europe’s own far right. Real Anger, Aimed at the Wrong Target None of this lands without genuine grievance underneath it. Eastern Germany has spent three decades watching factories close, and young people leave for the West. Brandenburg, a region that’s felt governed from afar for a generation, is now polling AfD support above 37 percent. The AfD is the first party in decades to show up and validate the anger, rather than explain it away. Even if the party’s policy answers- leaving NATO, scrapping renewables, cutting off Ukraine- don’t obviously fix a stagnant regional economy. Chancellor Merz’s government has spent the past two years tightening national asylum policy in hopes of winning back AfD-leaning voters. It hasn’t worked; AfD’s polling lead has only widened since. Voters who want the hardline version keep choosing the original over the CDU’s watered-down copy. The Part That’s Still Undecided The “firewall”- the informal agreement among CDU, SPD, Greens, and others never to govern with
By Isha Mallareddy
Have organizations like the American Teachers' Federation prioritized their employee benefits over students' learning?
By Edward Kim
Trump has widely criticized NATO countries for free-riding off of the United States for protection. But is this claim legitimate? President Trump’s recent deal with Denmark on establishing military presence in Greenland comes amidst years of his accusations against the Nordic Kingdom’s freeriding off of America’s defense capabilities. These accusations have been directed towards other members of NATO for years, and he has also urged the trans-Atlantic alliance’s member states to radically increase their defense spending. He argues that the United States, being the main contributor, absorbs an unfair share of the cost of defending two continents. And his anti-NATO rhetoric has only skyrocketed since his war with Iran, as support for the war has been strongly limited among the rest of the alliance’s members. But a closer look at NATO’s member states’ accomplishments in building defense systems suggests otherwise. European member states have maintained formidable militaries even during a historically rare lack of conflicts on the continent. The United Kingdom and France both possess their own nuclear arsenals, as well as extracontinental military bases. And they, along with Germany and Italy, host many of the world’s manufacturers of the highest-grade military equipment, such as BAE systems, Leonardo, and Airbus, producing world-class missiles and tanks including the Meteor and Leopard. Looking at the smaller member states, all Nordic countries except for Iceland have successfully implemented conscription systems that have given military training to significant shares of their adult populations, even while spending substantially less relative to their economies on defense than the USA. Similar systems have been implemented in the Baltic states after the end of their occupation by the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and they top the list of defense spending as a share of GDP in NATO. But the efforts of European countries to bolster their security extends well beyond their own borders. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the largest conflict on the European continent since the Second World War. Instead of leaving Ukraine all alone to fight Putin’s massive armies, NATO’s member states have donated billions of dollars’ worth of aid and weapons to the Ukrainian military. In fact, many have donated considerably more as a share of their GDP and per capita than the United States, with the Baltic and Nordic countries, including Denmark, dominating the top donors using these metrics. Solidarity with the Ukrainian diaspora has also been shown most by the European Union’s member states – most of which are in NATO – who quickly agreed to take in millions of Ukrainians after the war’s outbreak, and continue to host them years afterwards, giving them full access to their social welfare and job markets. Even examining their contributions on a global level, many European NATO members donate far more in aid to less developed countries relative to their GNIs than the USA does, much of which goes towards post-war reconstruction in conflict zones. Despite their small populations, NATO’s European members have massively contributed to the security of Ukraine and the welfare of many more countries that will only curtail social unrest, rather than forcing the United States to completely foot the bill. If anything, it is the United States that makes unfair demands on other NATO member states for its supposed defense. Only once in history has the organization’s collective defense provision in Article V been activated, and it was by the United States for the 20-year long Afghanistan war. Even after Osama bin Laden had been killed and Al-Qaeda was neutralized, the United States foolishly continued its efforts to nation-build in Afghanistan, ultimately costing NATO members trillions of dollars by the collapse of the internationally recognized government. In addition, many NATO members have cautioned against the United States’ other costly foreign interventions, such as the Iraq War and ongoing Iran war that have failed to improve the political stability of the Middle East, in addition to the Vietnam War. To preserve funds and supplies for defending the homeland, the United States should perhaps take lessons from its closest allies since World War II, rather than continue to ostracize them for dissent.
By Edward Kim
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