The AfD no longer looks like a protest party rattling the presently spiky gates of German politics. In Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday it won a gothic 43.8 per cent of the vote, more than twice its share five years ago, inflicting a spectacular defeat on the Christian Democrats and becoming the first far-right party to win a German state election since the end of the Second World War.
It fell short of a majority, and Germany’s political firewall may yet keep it from government. But something has changed. The question is no longer merely why a collection of powerful foreigners wanted to help Germany’s radical right. It’s what that help means now that the radical right is capable of winning.
For the AfD has acquired a remarkable collection of bosom buddies abroad.
Some are in Moscow, or in the famous influence operations connected to the Russian state. Others belong to the political rump surrounding Donald Trump. Elon Musk has told Germans that only the AfD can save them. JD Vance, as American vice-president no less, used the Munich Security Conference to attack the Brandmauer—the firewall by which Germany’s mainstream parties seek to isolate the AfD.
To be clear, there is no actual evidence that the AfD is simply a Kremlin puppet, nor that Moscow secretly finances the party as a whole. Trump has never endorsed it with Musk’s candour. Vance’s intervention was political and ideological, not covert. To collapse Russia, Musk, Vance and Trump into a single conspiracy would be to miss what is actually interesting about them.
But their interventions point in much the same alarming direction.
Russia amplifies. Musk endorses. Vance legitimises.
And the marching hearts of the AfD benefit from all three.
To be also clear, Russian attempts to influence German politics are not hypothetical. German efficient authorities have repeatedly documented campaigns designed to manipulate the information environment, using state media, cloned news websites, fake social-media accounts and coordinated networks intended to make manufactured political sentiment appear organic.
Among the most conspicuous was the operation generally known as Doppelgänger.
Ahead of Germany’s 2025 federal election, seasoned researchers identified hundreds of German-language posts bearing its fingerprints. The campaign promoted pro-AfD stories while attacking the Greens over Germany’s economic difficulties, Olaf Scholz over support for Ukraine and mainstream conservatives as untrustworthy.
The scale was extraordinary. During one six-week period, the German Foreign Office identified more than 50,000 fake X accounts responsible for more than 1.8 million automated German-language posts.
But this was not simply campaigning for the AfD. It was something broader, and potentially more consequential. It was an attempt to create an information environment in which the AfD’s arguments prospered.
Economic decline. Betrayal by governing elites. Resentment of Ukraine. Distrust of established media. Hostility towards the Greens. A Germany diminished by its own political class.
An influence operation does not need to persuade a German voter that Moscow is right if it can persuade the same voter that Berlin is lying.
Voice of Europe brought this closer to the traditional idea of political influence.
The European Union formally sanctioned the outlet as part of a Russian influence operation, describing a campaign of manipulation intended to destabilise Ukraine, the EU and its member states.
More pointedly, the EU said the organisation had been used to channel funds to propagandists and to build a network capable of influencing representatives of European political parties.
AfD politicians appeared on its platform. One of them, Petr Bystron, subsequently became central to investigations following intelligence gathered by the Czech authorities.
Reporting alleged discussions and transactions involving payments to European politicians. Bystron has consistently and emphatically denied receiving Russian or Voice of Europe money and demanded that the supposed evidence against him be released.
The publicly established case, then, is not that Moscow bought the AfD. It is that Kremlin-linked networks promoted political narratives advantageous to it. A sanctioned Russian influence operation cultivated European politicians. Individual AfD figures became subjects of investigations into those networks.
There is a considerable difference between benefiting from a foreign influence campaign and taking instructions from the foreign power behind it.
There is also a big difference between respecting that distinction and pretending the evidence does not exist.
Then came Elon Musk.
“Only the AfD can save Germany,” he declared in December 2024.
He subsequently gave Alice Weidel an hour-long conversation on X during the German election campaign. In January 2025 he appeared by video at an AfD rally in Halle, telling the crowd that he was excited for the party and describing it as Germany’s best hope.
Whatever else, it was not detached commentary by a foreign observer. One of the world’s richest men, the owner of one of its most politically important communications platforms and a central figure in and around the Trump administration was openly trying to help a German political party during an election campaign.
The remarkable thing was not that he did it. It was how little he bothered to disguise it.
JD Vance was subtler, but perhaps institutionally even more significant.
“Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters,” he told the 2025 Munich Security Conference. “There’s no room for firewalls.”
Anywhere else, the metaphor might have sounded innocuous. In Germany it was anything but. Brandmauer is the specific term for the refusal of mainstream parties to cooperate with the AfD.
Weidel understood immediately. She publicly celebrated the intervention. Vance then met her in Munich and discussed German domestic politics, Ukraine and freedom of speech.
He had not told Germans to vote AfD. He had done something arguably more useful to a party seeking respectability. He had challenged the legitimacy of excluding it.
And he had done so not as a billionaire provocateur on X, but as vice-president of the United States.
Trump himself requires more restraint.
After the 2025 federal election, in which Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU finished first and the AfD achieved its best national result to date, Trump with characteristic swagger called the result “a great day for Germany” and said Germans, like Americans, had grown tired of policies on immigration and energy.
The affinities were obvious. An endorsement of the AfD was not.
The more important story is the political ecosystem around him: Vance’s Munich intervention, growing contacts between American and AfD politicians and the attempt by sections of the MAGA movement to present Europe’s radical right as part of a common transatlantic struggle.
By late 2025, senior AfD politician Markus Frohnmaier was appearing at a MAGA gathering in New York with a delegation of AfD lawmakers and speaking openly of an alliance between American and German “patriots”.
What had once looked like ideological sympathy was becoming a serious political network.
None of this explains 43.8 per cent in Saxony-Anhalt.
Foreigners did not invent Germany’s economic grievances, migration anxieties, eastern resentments or profound disillusionment with Berlin. To attribute the AfD’s success principally to Russia or MAGA would be both lazy and patronising. Millions of Germans have chosen the AfD for German reasons.
But foreign actors recognised those conditions. They pumped up the volume on them, legitimised them and, in different ways, tried to make political use of them.
For years Germany’s firewall rested on an assumption about political legitimacy. In other words, whatever votes the AfD won, respectable institutions would not treat it as a normal party.
On Sunday, in Saxony-Anhalt, almost forty-four voters in every one hundred chose it anyway.
The firewall remains. But outside Germany, where some remarkably powerful people have been trying to knock holes in it for quite some time, those not utterly depressed by all this have no doubt been cracking open the Sekt.
No comments:
Post a Comment