Saxony-Anhalt is not proof of an unstoppable wave, but the bill for thirty years of incompetence from the European political center.
By Gustavo de Arístegui, as published by La Razón, 13 September, 2026
On September 6th, in Saxony-Anhalt, Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 43.8% of the vote . This figure is enormous, but it’s not the most unsettling aspect of the election. The most unsettling is something else: voter turnout reached 77.8%, an absolute record for the state since reunification. This wasn’t a victory by default or demobilization of the opposition; it was a massive mobilization in their favor.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union plummeted to 17.2%, less than half its previous total, and lost 25 of its 40 seats. The AfD fell just three seats short of an absolute majority. It’s worth noting a detail that has barely been mentioned in Spain: the AfD federation that just swept the elections has been classified since 2023 by the Verfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the state’s internal security and counter-espionage service) as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party.
The immediate temptation is to interpret the result as yet another confirmation of a continental wave sweeping across Europe from Lisbon to Helsinki. That interpretation is convenient, it’s the dominant one, and it’s false. What we have on the table is not one wave, but three simultaneous and divergent dynamics that must be clearly distinguished, because confusing them leads to serious forecasting errors.
Three simultaneous dynamics
The first is a vertical ascent: Germany, Austria, and France form the core of this phenomenon, with the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) at 34% and the National Rally becoming the favorite for the Élysée Palace. The second is a plateau or correction: the Netherlands punished Geert Wilders in October 2025 with the loss of eleven seats; Reform UK, which nearly reached 30%, has fallen behind Andy Burnham’s Labour Party; the Finns Party has dropped from 20.1% in 2023 to around 15%; the Sweden Democrats, according to polls, are entering this Sunday’s elections below their 2022 results. The third dynamic is outright defeat, and it’s the one no one mentions.
On April 12, 2026, Viktor Orbán lost power after sixteen years . Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won 141 of the 199 seats in the National Assembly with 53.18% of the party-list vote, compared to 38.61% for Fidesz, which plummeted from 135 to 52 seats. Voter turnout rose by more than nine points, to 78.99%. It is the most important European political event of the last five years and the most misunderstood: it demonstrates that a consolidated illiberal democracy, with its media apparatus and electoral machinery at its disposal, can be ousted at the ballot box.
The Hungarian elections placed many instruments at Orban’s disposal, especially the state-owned media, but they were still free elections . That, and nothing else, is the threshold that must be monitored. Furthermore, speaking of “the European far right” in the singular is a fundamental error. Under that label, at least four distinct intensities coexist. There is the fully integrated national conservative right, which accepts the constitutional framework, the Atlantic Alliance, and the reversibility of power: Brothers of Italy, whose pro-Atlantic and pro-Ukrainian foreign policy is currently firmer than that of several social democratic governments, Vox of Spain, or the Sweden Democrats.
The underlying phenomenon
That said, there is a fundamental, common, and structural phenomenon that explains the whole picture better than any other: the shift away from the working-class vote. In the 2024 French legislative elections, the National Rally and its allies won 57% of the working-class vote, twelve points more than in 2022, 44% of the vote among employees, and 49% of the vote among those without a high school diploma.
No political party had achieved such penetration among the French working class since the heyday of the Communist Party, which in 1978 garnered 20.6% of the legislative vote but in the 2024 European elections plummeted to a mere 2.36%: an 88% loss of its electoral strength in forty-six years. This electorate has not largely migrated to La France Insoumise, whose base is urban, university-educated, and young: the New Popular Front obtained 34% of the vote among party officials but only 21% among blue-collar workers. Instead, it has shifted to the radical right. The picture is the same in Austria and Germany: the Party for Freedom and the AfD are now the leading parties among manual laborers in their respective countries.
Christophe Guilluy and Jérôme Fourquet have spent a decade describing this mechanism, and the European establishment has spent another decade refusing to listen . Social democratic parties abandoned their working-class electorate in two stages: first, with the shift to free trade and financial deregulation in the 1990s; then, with the shift of their agenda toward post-materialist issues that shape the priorities of university professors, not those of the worker in a stamping plant threatened with closure. To this abandonment has been added a class disadvantage of historic proportions: the energy transition.
The ban on the combustion engine in 2035 was presented as a moral imperative and has been implemented as
an expropriation of industrial jobs . Volkswagen announced on September 3rd an additional 50,000 job cuts, bringing the total to around 100,000. Europe, once the world champion of the automotive industry, has handed over the keys to batteries, panels, and electric motors to China.
Every job eliminated in Wolfsburg or Zwickau is a potential vote for the AfD. It would be difficult to imagine a more effective policy for creating radical right-wing voters. There is a second phenomenon, one that is barely explored and even less understood: the vote of legalized and naturalized immigrants. The widespread intuition—that new citizens tend to vote conservative, and sometimes even radically right-wing, out of hostility toward open-door policies—is particularly evident in the United States, where Donald Trump obtained 48% of the Hispanic vote in 2024, the best Republican result since George W. Bush, a 22-point increase from 2020, according to the Pew Research Center’s verified voter survey. Among Hispanic men, support rose from 32% in 2016 to 45% in 2024. In France, the trend is exactly the opposite: according to the Ifop-Hexagone survey, 37% of voters with both parents of non-European origin declare their intention to vote for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and 51% of Muslim voters.
Original vote
Even more revealing: among Muslims in higher socio-professional categories, the figure is 59%, virtually identical to that of lower categories. It is not a class vote; it is a vote of origin . The variable that explains the divergence lies not in demand, but in supply. Where the right defines the nation’s border in legal and economic terms—the legal versus the illegal, the taxpayer versus the beneficiary—that border can be crossed through naturalization and effort, and yesterday’s newcomer can claim full membership. Where the border has been constructed in ethnic or civilizational terms, no administrative act makes the child of Algerians French in the eyes of identity politics.
A large part of the radical right in Western Europe has thus closed itself off to an electorate that
would be sociologically aligned with it on issues of family, authority, and public order. This is its main structural limitation to growth, and it will not correct it, because correcting it would be tantamount to abandoning its raison d’être. I would add a hypothesis that is not being considered in Spain: among us, where the bulk of naturalized immigrants are Hispanic American and Catholic, the boundary is legal, not civilizational. This electorate, ignored by polling, could be decisive in several Mediterranean and Madrid constituencies.
European democracies are sick
The worst is yet to come, and it’s our responsibility. Europe faces its greatest security crisis since 1945—war in Ukraine, war in the Gulf, Brent crude above $100, blackmail over the Strait of Hormuz—with no one at the helm. Friedrich Merz became Chancellor in May 2025 with considerable expectations; many of us had well-founded hopes for him. Sixteen months later, the EU’s growth rate has fallen below 20% in Germany as a whole for the first time in five years, and his response to the Saxony-Anhalt debacle has been to announce that he will double down on unpopular reforms.
It may be economically sound; it demonstrates that he still doesn’t understand that the problem isn’t the pace of reforms, but the lack of a narrative explaining their purpose and who foots the bill. Tocqueville warned of this: the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform. Neither Olaf Scholz nor Merz have aspired to be what Germany should be: the power that bears the heavy burden of European leadership.
Emmanuel Macron, in the twilight of a term ending in May 2027, is not in a position to replace him. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde formulated in 1964 the theorem that best describes our situation: the secularized liberal state lives off budgets it cannot guarantee. Ortega had warned thirty years earlier that the decisive fact of European public life was the rise of the masses to full social power, without any guarantee of leadership.
European democracies are gravely ill, but not dead. In twenty-four months, three predictions that were considered certain have failed: Wilders as prime minister, Farage as prime minister, and Orbán seemingly immovable. Anyone who today takes the AfD’s arrival at the Chancellery for granted is committing the same error of determinism. The radical right hasn’t won any debates; it has filled a vacuum. What decides the outcome is not the strength of the extreme, but the competence of the center.