For years, Germany’s political firewall had a relatively simple function: prevent Alternative für Deutschland from entering government without fundamentally changing how the rest of the political system operated. The election in Saxony-Anhalt may mark the point at which that logic begins to change.

According to projections released after polls closed on September 6, 2026, the AfD is on around 44.5% of the vote, far ahead of the CDU at roughly 18.5%. The result remains provisional, and the final composition of the Landtag will depend on the complete count, direct mandates and whether smaller parties cross the 5% electoral threshold. But the scale alone is already sufficient to raise a question that extends far beyond this election.

What happens to a parliamentary system when a party considered unacceptable as a coalition partner attracts almost half the electorate?

The question is not whether the AfD should be brought into government. The parties refusing to govern with it have their own political, historical and institutional reasons for doing so. The question is what that exclusion produces once the party concerned is no longer confined to the margins of the system.

Because a political firewall does not have the same consequences at 10%, 20% or 45% of the vote.

As the excluded party grows, it is not only its coalition options that shrink. So do everyone else’s.

That may be what Saxony-Anhalt has just revealed.

From barrier to system

The Brandmauer — literally, the firewall — rests on a relatively simple principle. Germany’s main political parties refuse government cooperation with the AfD, notably because of its positions on immigration, national identity and institutions, as well as the radicalisation observed within parts of the party.

As long as the AfD remains a minority force, the institutional cost of that strategy is limited.

A party holding 10 or 15% of the seats can be isolated without fundamentally disrupting the formation of parliamentary majorities. The remaining parties still have enough combinations available to alternate in power, negotiate coalitions and maintain relatively clear political distinctions.

When the excluded party reaches 25 or 30%, the arithmetic begins to tighten. Some coalitions become impossible. Traditional opponents may find themselves governing together.

Above 40%, the phenomenon changes dimension again.

The excluded party may still remain outside government, but it begins to determine indirectly almost every coalition that can be formed.

It becomes what might be called the system’s negative centre of gravity: a force around which power is organised precisely because power must be constructed without it.

The distinction matters.

The AfD does not need to enter government to transform Germany’s political system. It only needs to become large enough for its presence to alter the conditions under which every government excluding it must be formed.

The firewall then ceases to be merely a boundary.

It becomes an architecture.

The Saxony-Anhalt laboratory

The electoral reversal in Saxony-Anhalt gives this question unusual clarity.

In 2021, the CDU won 37.1% of the vote against 20.8% for the AfD. Five years later, according to the initial projections, the AfD would more than double its share while the CDU would lose roughly half of its own.

This is not the first time the AfD has finished first in a German state election. It had already done so in Thuringia in 2024. But the scale of the projected result in Saxony-Anhalt creates a different situation.

At around 44.5%, the AfD would no longer simply be the largest party in a fragmented system. On its own, it would approach the electoral weight of all the forces required to construct a majority against it.

If it ultimately secured an absolute majority of seats, the institutional question would change radically. If it remained below that threshold, as the initial projections suggest, a much more revealing political experiment would begin.

The other parties would have to seek a majority without the party that finished overwhelmingly first.

Such a coalition would be entirely consistent with the rules of parliamentary democracy. A parliamentary election does not necessarily award government to the largest party: it elects a legislature from which a governing majority must then emerge.

But institutional legality does not exhaust the political question.

The larger the excluded force becomes, the more a coalition designed to bypass it risks bringing together parties that are far apart ideologically. And the broader that coalition becomes, the more it can blur the boundaries that once allowed voters to distinguish clearly between government and opposition.

This is where the mechanism can begin to reinforce itself.

The firewall paradox

The Brandmauer is intended to prevent the political normalisation of the AfD. But maintaining it against an AfD that has become dominant in parts of Germany may inadvertently strengthen one of the narratives on which the party’s rise depends.

That of a closed political system.

Imagine a state in which one party receives more than 40% of the vote but has no coalition partner. The other parties, which fought one another during the campaign and may defend substantially different programmes, must then find a compromise in order to construct a majority.

Institutionally, there is nothing abnormal about this.

Politically, the image can be formidable.

The AfD can portray itself as the only genuine opposition to a collection of parties that, despite their stated differences, ultimately govern together whenever necessary to prevent it from taking power.

The firewall then produces a paradox: the more successfully it works institutionally, the more electorally useful it may become to the party it is designed to contain.

The potential mechanism is circular.

AfD gains reduce the number of coalitions available without it. That reduction forces traditional parties into broader alliances. Those alliances make their differences less visible. The AfD can then portray the rest of the political system as a homogeneous bloc defending its hold on power. That argument strengthens its position as an anti-system force. Further electoral gains then make coalitions without it even harder to construct.

Nothing guarantees that this cycle will continue. Voters can change their preferences, the AfD may encounter its own limits, other parties may renew themselves, and experience in local or national government can alter political dynamics.

But Saxony-Anhalt suggests that the mechanism is no longer theoretical.

The CDU’s trap

No party is more exposed to this transformation than the CDU.

For decades, the Christian Democrats occupied a central position in Germany’s party system. Their ability to govern with different partners allowed them to construct majorities across the centre and centre-right while capturing a broad share of the conservative electorate.

The AfD attacks precisely this architecture.

In Saxony-Anhalt, the reversal is dramatic. The CDU, which has governed the state since 2002, would fall from 37.1% to below 20% according to the initial projections, while the AfD moves in the opposite direction.

The problem for Friedrich Merz therefore extends far beyond one bad election night.

The CDU’s strategy rests partly on the assumption that a firmer position on immigration, security and certain questions of identity can recover voters who have moved to the AfD while maintaining an absolute prohibition on coalition cooperation with it.

Saxony-Anhalt exposes the difficulty of that equation.

Adopting some of the AfD’s themes can help move those issues to the centre of political debate without necessarily bringing AfD voters back to the CDU. Refusing to engage with them can instead leave the AfD with a political monopoly over concerns that have become important to part of the electorate.

But a third difficulty is now emerging.

The more firmly the CDU refuses to govern with the AfD, and the larger the AfD becomes, the more the CDU may be forced to govern with parties to its left in order to maintain the firewall.

It therefore risks being pulled in two directions at once: towards the right to compete electorally with the AfD, and towards the centre or left to construct parliamentary majorities without it.

That contradiction could become one of the defining problems of the German centre-right.

The problem extends beyond the AfD

It would nevertheless be reductive to treat this solely as a German story or as a problem specific to the radical right.

The mechanism potentially concerns any parliamentary democracy confronted with the emergence of a political force considered incompatible with the other parties.

A firewall works as long as the parties inside the perimeter retain enough electoral space to conduct normal political competition.

They can alternate in power, construct different coalitions and remain genuine adversaries while keeping the excluded party at a distance.

But once that party becomes sufficiently powerful, the structure begins to reverse.

The parties inside the firewall are no longer united only by what they accept. Increasingly, they are united by what they reject.

The risk is that political competition ceases to be organised primarily around competing programmes and instead revolves around a prior question: with or without the excluded party.

At that point, the excluded force has already achieved a structural victory.

Not because it governs, but because it determines the axis around which everyone else must position themselves.

The invisible threshold

There is obviously no precise percentage at which a political firewall ceases to function.

Electoral systems, party structures, representation thresholds, direct mandates and coalition cultures differ too widely for any universal rule.

But there is probably a political threshold.

The moment when the cost of exclusion begins to transform those doing the excluding more than the party being excluded.

Saxony-Anhalt may be approaching it.

If the AfD remains outside government despite a result close to 45%, the Brandmauer will have fulfilled its immediate function: preventing the party from obtaining executive power.

But that success will not solve the problem that made the firewall necessary.

It will not make AfD voters disappear. It will not rebuild the CDU. It will not resolve the political fractures between eastern and western Germany. It will not eliminate the concerns surrounding immigration, energy, identity, Russia or distrust of institutions that contribute to the party’s support.

It will simply move the problem from the electoral arena to the formation of governments.

And the larger the AfD becomes, the harder that displacement will be to sustain.

The fundamental question is therefore no longer simply whether Germany can continue to govern without the AfD.

It is how long its party system can continue reorganising itself around the AfD’s exclusion without being transformed by that exclusion itself.

For years, the Brandmauer defined the limits of Germany’s political system.

In Saxony-Anhalt, it may be beginning to define its structure.

Main sources

Reuters, September 6, 2026 — Saxony-Anhalt state election projections, comparative results and political reactions.

Associated Press, September 6, 2026 — ARD and ZDF estimates and the political context of the election.

ARD / Tagesschau, September 6, 2026 — election projections and comparison with the 2021 state election.

Landeswahlleiterin Sachsen-Anhalt — official results and information relating to the September 6, 2026 state election.

Statistisches Landesamt Sachsen-Anhalt — official results from previous state elections and historical electoral data.

Figures relating to the 2026 election cited in this article are based on projections available after polls closed. The distribution of seats and coalition scenarios should be updated once the official provisional result is published.