The AfD’s Rise Should Alarm Israel

Eighty years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, a party accused of harboring extremists and minimizing the crimes of the Holocaust has won a stunning electoral victory. For Jews in Germany, Israel and across Europe, the question is no longer whether the far right is returning. It is how close it can get to power.

The ghosts of Germany’s past are not supposed to be part of its political future.

Yet the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has just delivered one of the most consequential electoral shocks in postwar German politics. In Saxony-Anhalt, the party won 43.8% of the vote—more than twice its result in the state’s 2021 election—leaving Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union far behind.

No party classified as far right has won a state election in Germany with such a margin since 1945.

For Jewish communities, the symbolism is impossible to ignore. Germany rebuilt its democratic identity after the Holocaust around a solemn commitment: Never again would antisemitism, racial nationalism and political extremism be allowed to consume the state.

The AfD’s ascent is testing that commitment.

The Firewall Is Under Pressure

Germany’s postwar political system has operated with an unusually rigid barrier against extremist parties. Mainstream political organizations have traditionally refused to form governing coalitions with the AfD.

That barrier, often described as the Brandmauer, or firewall, was intended to ensure that electoral success could not automatically translate into political legitimacy.

Saxony-Anhalt has now exposed how vulnerable that system has become.

The AfD fell only three seats short of a governing majority. Any defections from the CDU—or cooperation from another party—could theoretically give it a path into government.

Even if that does not happen, the result has already altered the political landscape.

The prospect of AfD politicians controlling institutions such as the police, judiciary, education system or domestic intelligence apparatus would represent a profound change in Germany’s postwar political culture.

For Jewish Germans, there is another concern: the party’s record on Holocaust remembrance and antisemitism.

Some senior AfD figures have made statements minimizing Nazi crimes or questioning the central place of Holocaust remembrance in German national life. Other members have had associations with extremist movements.

Germany’s Jewish population has every reason to watch closely.

Merz Has a Political Problem

The result is also a severe blow to Merz.

When he led the CDU into battle against the AfD, Merz promised to contain the party’s growth. Instead, the AfD is now leading national polling by roughly eight percentage points, according to the figures cited in the original analysis.

AfD leaders are already looking beyond Saxony-Anhalt.

Ulrich Siegmund, the party’s successful state-level leader, has set his sights on pushing the AfD toward 40% in the next federal election. Alice Weidel, the party’s co-chair, has gone further, predicting that the CDU may never win another election.

Those claims may be political bravado. But the numbers behind them are increasingly difficult for Germany’s establishment to dismiss.

Two more state elections are scheduled for Sept. 20, including contests in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin. Another strong AfD showing would deepen the pressure on Merz and further erode the political firewall.

Berlin would be particularly symbolic.

A far-right breakthrough in the German capital would reverberate well beyond city politics.

From Euro Skeptics to the Far Right

The AfD did not begin as a neo-Nazi party.

Founded in 2013 by academics and former CDU figures, it initially focused on opposition to the euro and Germany’s role in the European bailout programs during the debt crisis.

Then came the migration crisis.

Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to allow more than one million migrants from the Middle East and elsewhere into Germany transformed the country’s political debate. The AfD found an issue capable of turning economic anxiety, cultural unease and distrust of Berlin’s political establishment into electoral momentum.

Its 2017 federal election result was a breakthrough: 12.6% of the vote and 94 seats in the Bundestag.

The party subsequently moved further right.

Alexander Gauland, one of its former leaders, caused international outrage in 2018 when he described the Nazi era as little more than “bird shit” in the context of German history.

Other controversies followed.

The party’s rhetoric increasingly challenged Germany’s postwar approach to national identity, immigration and historical responsibility. Its critics argue that it seeks to rehabilitate aspects of a German past that the Federal Republic deliberately rejected after 1945.

That is particularly disturbing to Jewish observers.

Germany’s relationship with Israel has long been tied to its responsibility for the Holocaust. Successive German governments have treated Israel’s security as a central element of German foreign policy.

The AfD’s rise raises uncomfortable questions about what happens to that commitment if the party moves from opposition into government.

A Different Vision of Germany

The AfD’s appeal extends beyond immigration. Economic frustration has become a major part of its political weaponry, particularly in eastern Germany.

The former East Germany continues to lag behind many western regions economically. Energy prices surged following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while Germany’s industrial model came under increasing pressure.

The AfD has exploited those frustrations by attacking Berlin’s support for Ukraine and arguing for renewed access to inexpensive Russian energy.

Its foreign-policy agenda goes considerably further.

The party has advocated closer relations with Moscow. Some AfD leaders have questioned Germany’s membership in NATO and called for leaving the euro and, in some cases, the Schengen system. That puts the party well outside the mainstream European consensus. It also puts Germany’s future relationship with Israel into sharper focus.

A government more sympathetic to Russia and less committed to NATO would fundamentally alter Europe’s strategic balance. It could also complicate Germany’s longstanding relationship with Israel at a moment when the Middle East remains central to Western security policy.

Europe’s Far Right Is Not One Movement

The AfD belongs to a broader European political shift, but it is not identical to every other right-wing populist party.

Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France has moved toward political normalization and has distanced itself from some of the AfD’s more extreme positions.

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has likewise moved toward the European mainstream since becoming prime minister, backing NATO, Ukraine and the Western alliance. The AfD has been far less accommodating.

Its European opponents expelled it from their parliamentary group after an AfD politician suggested that membership in Hitler’s SS did not automatically make someone a criminal.

The party has also embraced the concept of “remigration,” a term that has generated intense controversy because its advocates have used it in connection not merely with illegal immigration but with broader efforts to remove people regarded as having foreign backgrounds.

For Jewish Europeans, such ideas evoke an especially grim history. Germany’s Nazi regime categorized citizens according to ancestry and transformed racial identity into state policy. Modern Germany is a constitutional democracy, and today’s AfD is not the Nazi Party. But language about who belongs, who does not and who should be removed inevitably carries a particular weight in Germany.

Why Israel Is Watching

The AfD’s rise is not simply a German domestic story.

Germany is Europe’s largest economy and one of the continent’s most important military powers. Its defense spending has expanded dramatically since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Germany governed—or eventually co-governed—by the AfD would therefore have consequences far beyond its borders.

For Israel, the stakes are particularly significant. Germany has been one of Israel’s most important European partners. Berlin has repeatedly described Israel’s security as part of Germany’s historic responsibility.

That relationship rests partly on a political consensus born from the Holocaust.

If the AfD enters government, Germany would confront an extraordinary contradiction: a country whose democratic legitimacy is deeply intertwined with confronting the Nazi past could place a party accused of minimizing that past closer to the center of political power.

That does not mean Germany is about to become Nazi Germany. The Federal Republic possesses powerful democratic institutions, an independent judiciary, a vibrant civil society and constitutional safeguards that did not exist under Hitler.

But history offers no guarantee that democratic institutions remain healthy simply because they once survived a catastrophe.

The Jewish Question Returns to Europe

There is a broader European dimension to this story.

Across the continent, Jewish communities have faced renewed antisemitism from multiple political directions. Far-right movements have their own history of antisemitic conspiracy theories and racial nationalism, while Islamist extremism has produced another serious threat to Jewish communities.

The result is an increasingly difficult security environment for European Jews.

Germany’s postwar model was built around confronting this reality rather than ignoring it.

The AfD’s electoral breakthrough therefore carries significance beyond the party’s immigration policy or economic platform. It forces Germans to reconsider what the country’s political red lines actually mean.

If the firewall survives, the AfD may remain a powerful opposition force without access to federal government.

If the firewall breaks, Germany enters unfamiliar territory.

The Election That Europe Cannot Ignore

The most important fact about the AfD is also the simplest: millions of Germans are voting for it.

Those voters cannot all be dismissed as extremists.

Some are angry about immigration. Others are furious about energy prices, economic stagnation or the war in Ukraine. Some believe traditional parties have become detached from ordinary Germans. Others genuinely support the AfD’s nationalist agenda.

Treating every AfD voter as a neo-Nazi would therefore be politically convenient—and strategically foolish.

The challenge for Germany’s mainstream parties is harder. They must address the concerns driving the AfD’s popularity without normalizing the elements of its program that threaten Germany’s democratic culture.

For Israel and Germany’s Jewish population, the question is even more fundamental.

Can Germany remain a country whose democratic identity is inseparable from the lessons of the Holocaust while allowing a party accused of challenging parts of that historical consensus to move steadily toward power?

Saxony-Anhalt has provided no final answer.

It has, however, made the question impossible to avoid.