Why Germany Will Break the AfD
Votes alone will never translate into power.
Germany has entered its Spenglerian winter, the late civilizational phase where institutions endure yet meaning decays, and the rise of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) marks the last convulsion of a people sensing dispossession. De-industrialization accelerates under ideological management, energy self-destruction hollows out the productive base, and economic devastation is reframed as moral necessity while entire regions slide into managed decline. Demographic transformation advances faster than social cohesion can absorb, ethnic replacement is renamed progress, and the political class governs collapse through procedure, censorship, and ritualized outrage. In this landscape, the AfD emerges as both symptom and warning, an electoral revolt against a system that administers decline as destiny, yet the very ferocity of the response to its ascent reveals a deeper truth: the West no longer debates its future because its elites have already accepted its end, choosing control over renewal as the final expression of power.
The rise of the AfD in the eastern German states has stirred a strange mixture of hope and dread across the country. Hope among those who believe that a new political force might finally give voice to regions long dismissed as backward. Dread among those who fear any deviation from the safe, predictable patterns laid down since the middle of the last century. Yet beneath the noise, a colder truth waits: even if the AfD someday commands half the vote in East Germany—a distant prospect, given that its present support remains far from the threshold—the party will still face an order built to absorb or destroy any force that threatens its settled arrangements.
One sees signs of this order everywhere. AfD mayoral candidates are prevented from standing in elections through clever administrative maneuvers. Intelligence agencies watch the party as if it were an underground terrorist cell. Commentators speak calmly about a party ban, as if such a measure were a minor tool rather than a political bomb. It is important to grasp what these gestures reveal: the ruling establishment treats the electoral process as a useful spectacle, yet keeps the real levers of power behind bulletproof glass, reachable only to those who already belong.
Even if the AfD crosses the magical boundary of fifty percent in a state election, the gates will not swing open. The courts will challenge every decree. The ministries will follow instructions only when it suits them. The press will raise alarms from morning until night. The federal government will signal its disapproval through budgetary controls or through sudden legal reinterpretations. Beyond these visible organs lie the quieter networks—commissions, permanent secretaries, advisory councils, transatlantic foundations—ready to tighten the reins as needed.
To understand why this machinery behaves in such a manner, one must remember the deeper story of the Federal Republic. Since 1945, Germany has carried the form of a sovereign state, yet its sovereignty is conditional, limited, and subject to outside influence. The postwar settlement placed the country inside a network of alliances, treaties, and military dependencies that frame every major political decision. Germany is governed by Germans; yet the boundaries within which they may act were set long ago by foreign powers and remain guarded by institutions that answer to interests larger than the electorate. The result is a state with elections yet without full autonomy, armed forces yet without full command over them, and governments that steer only within lines drawn long before they take office.
Imagine, then, what would happen if the AfD were to form a government in an eastern state. It would hold the title of power yet face a system that denies newcomers access to the real instruments of authority. The party would attempt reforms, yet each step would trigger resistance from judges, administrators, academics, and the vast archipelago of funded associations that shape German public life. Even if the AfD enters government, the process known in Italy as the Melonization effect would begin: the party would be praised for its maturity, encouraged to moderate its tone, guided into acceptable channels, and drawn ever deeper into the structures it once vowed to challenge. Days would pass, then months, and soon the new government would find itself performing duties almost identical to those of its predecessors, changed more by the system than the system by it.
It is tempting to speak of conspiracies, yet the truth is simpler and more troubling: systems endure by disciplining every force that enters them. The Federal Republic has perfected this art. It grants movements the right to speak, even the right to win elections, yet refuses them the right to transform the underlying order. The East may deliver votes in overwhelming numbers, yet the center will still remain in the driver’s seat. The AfD may grow in strength, yet the apparatus of the state—shaped by alliances, history, and fear of rupture—will shape the AfD in turn.
Thus, the question is not whether the AfD will win an absolute majority. The real question is what such a victory would mean in a country where formal authority is always shadowed by deeper currents. The crowd at the ballot box may roar, yet the machinery behind the curtain moves with its own logic, indifferent to the passing excitement of elections. In such a landscape, a party may rise, triumph, and celebrate, only to discover that victory grants access only to the stage, never to the backstage where the true script is written.
This is the paradox of modern Germany: a nation with democratic rituals yet guarded by invisible boundaries; a nation in which victory at the polls may change the government yet leave the order itself untouched. Until those boundaries are acknowledged and examined, every movement that seeks genuine change will encounter the same fate: praised for its discipline, condemned for its excesses, and guided smoothly into harmlessness. The illusion of power will remain, yet the substance will slip once again into the hands of those who have held it without interruption since the last guns fell silent in 1945.
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