# Why the World Is Watching Germany's Far Right Surge > Back to back state election wins for the AfD are being read well beyond Germany's borders, with analysts warning that a stronger far right voice in Berlin could reshape everything from support for Ukraine to the broader political center across Europe. - Source: Berlin Today - Canonical URL: https://berlintoday.eu/article/why-the-world-is-watching-germany-s-far-right-surge - Author: Doug Brown - Section: Politics - Published: 2026-09-23T21:57:22.985Z - Updated: 2026-09-23T21:57:22.985Z - Tags: Germany, AfD, Alice Weidel, Ukraine, far right, European Union, election --- The Alternative for Germany's run of state election victories has drawn attention far beyond German borders, and for reasons that go well past domestic politics. The party took 43.8 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6, then followed that two weeks later with more than 38 percent in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a result strong enough to push Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU below the threshold needed to win any seats in that state at all. Those numbers matter inside Germany, but analysts argue the real reason the rest of the world should be paying attention has less to do with regional parliaments and more to do with what a stronger AfD could eventually mean for Germany's role in supporting Ukraine and holding together Europe's political center. ## The Ukraine Question Germany has become one of Ukraine's most important backers since Russia's full scale invasion, providing financial support and military hardware that Kyiv depends on heavily. The AfD has consistently taken a far more conciliatory line toward Moscow than Germany's mainstream parties, and a party with growing electoral weight and a softer stance on Russia raises real questions about how durable that support could prove if the AfD's influence over national policy keeps expanding beyond the states it already controls. For Kyiv and its other Western backers, that possibility alone is enough to make Germany's domestic politics a matter of direct strategic concern rather than a purely internal affair. ## Hollowing Out the Center Beyond Ukraine specifically, political analysts point to a broader pattern the AfD's rise represents. Catherine Fieschi, a political scientist with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has described the dynamic as a hollowing out of the political center, in which support drains away from mainstream parties toward more extreme alternatives on both ends of the spectrum, weakening the coalition building and compromise that centrist governance typically depends on. That dynamic is not unique to Germany, but the country's size and economic weight mean a hollowed out center in Berlin would ripple through European Union decision making far more than a similar shift in a smaller member state. ## Weidel's Platform Co-leader Alice Weidel has built the party's platform around tighter immigration controls, including systematically rejecting asylum applications and pushing what the AfD calls remigration, initiatives aimed at deporting foreign nationals from Germany. That agenda, paired with the party's posture toward Russia, is precisely the combination that has drawn the closest international scrutiny as the AfD's electoral map keeps expanding. ## Why It Matters None of this means the AfD is on the verge of controlling the federal government, but each additional state win normalizes the party a little further and puts more pressure on the political firewall that has kept it out of coalition governments so far. For a world watching Germany's role in European security and Ukraine's defense, the question is no longer whether the AfD can win elections, since it clearly can, but how much national policy actually shifts as its regional footprint keeps growing. --- Originally published by Berlin Today. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://berlintoday.eu/article/why-the-world-is-watching-germany-s-far-right-surge.