Nobody Had to Care

On Sunday the AfD took 43.8 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt. Turnout was 77.8 percent, the highest the state has recorded since reunification. Five years ago it was 60. The largest single source of the AfD's new votes was people who had not voted last time, about 170,000 of them. Sixty-one percent of workers voted AfD.[1] The CDU, which had governed the state continuously since 2002, went from 37 percent to 17.[2]

I grew up in the Ruhr and I have lived in the United States since 1981. The result shocked me. It should not have.

The first explanation everyone reaches for is poverty. People lose their jobs, the parties stop listening, and any snake oil salesman gets a hearing. I reached for it myself on Sunday night, but this wasn't it.

Unemployment in Saxony-Anhalt is 8.2 percent, against 6.5 nationally. Bremen is at 11.5, Berlin at 10.6 and Hamburg is at 8.6.[3] None of them vote AfD at 44. Even the state's own history did not hint at this. Unemployment there peaked at 21.8 percent in 2003, the worst of any German state.[4] That was mass joblessness, one worker in five. The far right's best result in those years was the DVU entering the Landtag in 1998 with 12.9 percent, and the faction had split before the term was over.[5] Since 2003 the rate has dropped thirteen points. In the same period the AfD went from not existing to 44.

What does make sense though is that full-time earnings are about a fifth below the national average. The average age is 48.3, the oldest of any state. The state's own statisticians project the working-age population falling by a quarter between 2019 and 2035.[6] This is a place emptying out as the young leave. The ones who stay watch the doctor, the school, and the train line close in the same decade, and they know that it will get worse.

The line that fits this is the one I heard from the start and set aside as too simple: the parties that governed them did not care about them.

On Sunday three parties offered their solutions. Die Linke was the protest party of this region for twenty years and polled in the twenties here in the 2000s.[7] It offered protection from the same market. It got 8.6 percent. The BSW offered the same protection with a harder line on migration. It got 5.3. The AfD got 43.8. All addressed the same abandonment. The voters chose the AfD, decisively.

The parties that governed the East after 1990 were western parties. The CDU took over the old bloc party's offices, and the SPD had none at all.[8] Their head offices, their money and their careers were in Bonn and then Berlin, and nothing in Saxony-Anhalt could reach them. That starts in 1990. The Treuhand took over the East German state enterprises, around 8,500 of them with about four million workers, and had disposed of them by the end of 1994. Employment in those firms fell to roughly a million and a half.[9] There was nobody on the labor side to defend it. The FDGB, the old state union federation, dissolved itself on September 30, 1990.[10] The SPD had been merged into the SED in 1946 and had not existed in the East for more than forty years. The one mass party the East had was the PDS, the SED's successor. It held a fifth of the vote in this state for two decades and kept an SPD minority government in office in Magdeburg from 1994 to 2002. It counted here. It never counted in the Bundestag, where no government would take it as a partner, and it had no union behind it. Its membership fell from about 280,000 in 1990 to about 60,000 by 2006.[11] The church and labor milieu that shaped the Ruhr had no counterpart. The legal structures of the West were extended east: works councils, codetermination. But the organizations that had made those structures powerful in the West did not have the same history or density in the East.

The money was there. Transfers from West to East since 1990 come to about one and a half trillion euros.[12] What Bonn and then Berlin could ignore, at no cost, was what the region wanted done with it. Nobody in Saxony-Anhalt could make that expensive.

I know the other version of this story because I grew up inside it. The Ruhr had half a million miners in 1957. The last pit closed in 2018.[13] But the Ruhr had IG Bergbau and an SPD office in every district, and the decline was negotiated over forty years, closure by closure, with retraining money and early pensions, and no colliery closed without a social plan.[14] It still ended with a quarter of Gelsenkirchen's adults on benefits and more than a third of its children and the AfD as a serious party in a town that used to elect Social Democrats by reflex.[15] In the Ruhr, Bonn learned what the region would and would not put up with from IG Bergbau and the SPD offices, and decided accordingly. In Saxony-Anhalt there was nobody to learn it from.

In the West the settlement was won. Workers with support from the unions and parties forced it. In the East the money came from the West. Ownership and decision rights went the other way. A region held in that position for thirty years does not learn to demand a bigger share, because there is nobody to demand it through. It develops a demand for recognition and control. The AfD learned how to organize around that demand.

The AfD did something the established parties had failed to do. It organized. For ten years it ran the Stammtisch, the village festival, the citizens' evening, in towns where the SPD had no office and the CDU had stopped showing up.[16] On election night one commentator after another on ARD and ZDF said the same thing: the AfD won because it was there. It built from the right the organization the West never built there. The AfD was selling presence, and it had been delivering it for a decade.

The center's answer to that organizing was a firewall. In the West the center could argue with the AfD through organizations that reached people, unions, local party chapters, churches. In the East the center fell back on the one tool it had: a firewall against a party it regarded as a threat to the country's liberal democratic constitutional order.[17] From the East the word for that is Bevormundung, and a political establishment telling people which party is not legitimate is something this region has heard before, from a government that called itself antifascist by decree. The firewall was a substitute for a counter-power the center did not have there. On Sunday, at 44 percent on 78 percent turnout, that substitute was tested. Tino Chrupalla said it on ARD that night: the firewall has been voted out.[18]

I have written before that the AfD, along with Brexit and Le Pen, is the bill for decades of using migration to paper over a growth problem nobody would name. I still think that is right at the national level. It does not explain Saxony-Anhalt on its own. The state's foreign population is 7.9 percent against 14.9 for Germany, one of the lowest shares in the country, and in the East AfD support runs strongest where there are fewest migrants.[19] When a grievance does not track local conditions, policy that changes local conditions will not reach it. The grievance is the doctor, the school, and the train line. Migration is the word people have for it.

I am a West German who left in 1981, writing about an East German election from Minneapolis. That is two steps removed, and I would not tell people in Magdeburg what they meant. The mechanism tells you how we got here.

Bismarck understood this in 1883. He built health insurance for workers because the socialists were organized enough to make not building it expensive. Concessions come when ignoring people costs more than paying attention to them. Nobody had to pay attention to Saxony-Anhalt for thirty years. On Sunday, 170,000 people who had stopped voting came back to present the bill. People who stop voting can come back. Who is there when they do is still open.

Sources

[1] Infratest dimap for ARD, voter migration and exit poll, 6 September 2026, via Tagesspiegel. Net gain from previous non-voters about 170,000; 61 percent of workers.

[2] Landeswahlleiterin Sachsen-Anhalt, preliminary official result, Landtagswahl 6 September 2026, as reported by Tagesspiegel, 7 September 2026. AfD 43.8, CDU 17.2 (2021: 37.1), SPD 9.3, Grüne 8.9, Linke 8.6, BSW 5.3; turnout 77.8 (2021: 60.3).

[3] Bundesagentur für Arbeit, Arbeitsmarkt im August 2026, and the Regionaldirektionen's August releases for Sachsen-Anhalt, Bremen, Berlin and Hamburg.

[4] Statistisches Landesamt Sachsen-Anhalt, 25 Jahre Sachsen-Anhalt: Arbeitslosigkeit, 2015.

[5] Landtagswahl Sachsen-Anhalt, 26 April 1998: DVU 12.9 percent, 16 seats. The faction split in February 2000.

[6] Statistisches Landesamt Sachsen-Anhalt, 7. Regionalisierte Bevölkerungsprognose, ages 20 to 66, 2019 to 2035. Average age from Destatis, 2024. Earnings: gross full-time annual earnings 2025, Destatis and Statistisches Landesamt.

[7] PDS in Sachsen-Anhalt: 19.9 percent (1994), 19.6 (1998), 20.4 (2002), 24.1 (2006), 23.7 (2011, as Die Linke). Landeswahlleiterin Sachsen-Anhalt.

[8] The East German CDU merged into the western CDU at the Hamburg party congress, 1 to 2 October 1990. The SDP was founded in Schwante on 7 October 1989 and built its local associations from nothing; Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Erinnerungsorte der Sozialdemokratie.

[9] Marcus Böick, Treuhandanstalt und Wirtschaftsumbau, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2020.

[10] Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (FDGB), Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2021. The DGB unions chose to rebuild in the East rather than take over FDGB structures. SPD and KPD were merged into the SED on 21 to 22 April 1946.

[11] Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Mitgliederentwicklung der Parteien: about 281,000 at the end of 1990, nearly four fifths lost by the end of 2006. The Magdeburg minority government under Reinhard Höppner was tolerated by the PDS from 1994 to 2002.

[12] Gross transfers West to East, Die Kosten und Erträge der Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung: over 1.5 trillion euros by 2011 (DIW), an estimated 1.72 trillion by 2016; about 1.4 trillion net of return flows.

[13] Statistik der Kohlenwirtschaft, Gesamtbelegschaft nach Revieren 1945 to 2018: Ruhr workforce 495,847 at the end of 1957, 3,371 at the end of 2018. Prosper-Haniel closed on 21 December 2018.

[14] Carmen Molitor, Kollektiver Kraftakt, Magazin Mitbestimmung, Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, September 2015: Anpassungsgeld, transfers and retraining under the RAG social plans; "niemand fiel ins Bergfreie."

[15] Gelsenkirchen: SGB-II rate for the population under retirement age 23.3 percent at the end of 2024, for under-18s 36.4 percent (end 2024) and 34.6 percent (end 2025), the highest of all German Kreise; BIAJ from Bundesagentur für Arbeit data. AfD 24.7 percent of second votes in Gelsenkirchen at the 2025 Bundestag election, first place; Bundeswahlleiterin. The SPD held the constituency from 1949 with 55 to 66 percent of first votes through the 1970s to 1990s.

[16] Knut Bergmann, Matthias Diermeier, Jan Engler and Melinda Fremerey, Lokale Präsenz von Parteien: ein Ost-West-Gefälle?, IW-Kurzbericht 42, Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft, 7 May 2025: of 9,337 party offices counted in 2023, about 90 percent of CDU and SPD offices are in the West; the AfD has about 45 percent of its offices in the East, where it accounts for 17 percent of all party offices against 3 percent in the West. On the AfD's rural organizing strategy, Euronews, 7 April 2026, on the "ländliche Raumnahme" paper: Stammtische, Osterfeuer, information stands, then permanent centers.

[17] The Sachsen-Anhalt Verfassungsschutz classified the state AfD as "gesichert rechtsextremistisch" on 7 November 2023. The federal classification of 2 May 2025 is suspended pending the main proceeding; VG Köln, press release, 26 February 2026.

[18] Tino Chrupalla on ARD, election night, 6 September 2026; wording confirmed by Euronews, 7 September 2026.

[19] Foreign population 7.9 percent at the end of 2025, Statistisches Landesamt Sachsen-Anhalt; Germany 14.9 percent. Marcel Fratzscher, Sachsen-Anhalt zeigt das AfD-Paradox, DIW aktuell 121, 24 July 2026: in eastern Germany, higher AfD shares go with lower foreign-population shares.