On Sunday, the right-wing Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD, won nearly forty-four per cent of the vote in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD beat the second-place finisher, the center-right Christian Democratic Union, by more than twenty-five points, and gave itself the chance to govern a state for the first time since it was founded, in 2013. The AfD has been gaining in the polls across Germany, and especially in the former German Democratic Republic, which was absorbed by West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It remains unclear whether the other parties can negotiate with one another to block the AfD from coming to power in Saxony-Anhalt. (Those negotiations could last weeks.) But the fact that a German extremist party—the AfD is classified as such by the German federal government—could take power in a German state has caused alarm and consternation across much of Europe.

After the election, I spoke by phone with Katja Hoyer, a German-British historian and the author of “Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the roots of the AfD’s success, whether the establishment parties have been making strategic errors in trying to block the AfD, and what the history of East Germany can tell us about the rise of the far right today.

The AfD has been rising in Germany for more than a decade. Has that rise been continuous, or has something changed more recently to allow them to do as well as they did on Sunday?

They have had a pretty continuous rise since around 2017. They have risen more prominently in the East, but across Germany as well. So it’s been a pretty steady trajectory, but the difference now is that they’ve reached a point where they likely can’t be kept out of power anymore by the so-called firewall that the other parties have created against them. They’ve basically reached a point now where treating them as a kind of extremist fringe party that can be kept away from the government by sheer force is not going to work anymore. So I think that’s the difference now—just the sheer numbers that they’ve reached.

How do you understand this continuous rise, particularly in the East?

When I say that nothing has particularly changed recently, I really mean that the fundamental factors haven’t changed. People still feel that things have gotten worse economically. The German economy has not come out of its malaise, and a lot of jobs have been lost, particularly in the industrial sectors. So we’re seeing that plenty of working-class voters in particular are flocking to the AfD, and that’s an important thing to understand, especially because there is a higher percentage of those voters in the East, where Saxony-Anhalt is. I think you can compare what was formerly East Germany to the Rust Belt states in the United States, or some more rural parts of other European countries, or the North of England, which are all areas where we’ve seen similar voting patterns.

I’ve heard the Rust Belt comparison before, but what seems different to me is that, before Donald Trump, the Rust Belt was generally swing states, or leaned toward Democrats, and then they went to Trump. But all kinds of other areas of the United States were already voting for Republicans, and they voted at way higher rates for Trump than the Rust Belt did, including almost all of the South. That’s not true in Germany at all.

Well, the voters in the East have shown in the past that they are less tied to the traditional parties. Previously, they would often go to the far left. That’s a tradition that possibly stems from them having formerly been East Germany, and having a constituency that wants a stronger state, a bigger welfare state, and a socialist tinge to policy. But many of those voters have also shifted over now to the right. And I think the other thing is that within Germany you’ve always got a sense of—and I’m from the East myself—that the establishment, or the urban élites, are trying to prescribe a specific culture to all of the country, and that’s particularly resented in the East.

A lot of people have criticized the firewall strategy you mentioned earlier, either in Germany or in other countries dealing with the far right. Do you think there was or is an alternative?

I think the biggest issue is that the concerns of AfD voters weren’t taken seriously for a long time. There’s migration, for example, which is a huge issue, of course, in Germany since 2015 with the refugee crisis. And there was the fact that the [decision to take in more than a million refugees and asylum seekers] was made by Angela Merkel, who was supposed to be a center-right politician. And so, effectively, when she said, look, this is not only what needs to happen but it’s a good thing, there was no room for people to say, actually, We don’t really like this; it’s going too far. There was no room for any kind of democratic vehicle for people to say that they didn’t like it to the establishment. For a long time, the Conservatives weren’t taking these concerns seriously. And then when Merkel left, in 2021, I think there was a real chance for the center right to change that, and it didn’t change. The Conservatives put a continuity candidate forward, he lost, and there were three years of a center-left government, and now, under Friedrich Merz, who’s supposed to be a staunch conservative, there doesn’t appear to be enough change or a consideration there that these concerns matter. I think a bigger issue than what to do about the AfD is what to do about the voters and their concerns.

Immigration tends to be thought of as a cultural issue more than an economic issue. And the question of whether you’re going to meet the voters on their economic concerns or their cultural concerns is obviously a live one. Are you suggesting that the way to do it is to meet them on their cultural concerns?

I think there was a sense that the government had lost control over immigration. So people, especially in Saxony-Anhalt, where there’s a constant shortage of workers, can understand that you need immigrant labor, but what they want is that the state controls who comes in and out of the country, and that people who’ve committed very serious crimes, like murder and rape, will be deported, or at the very least detained. I think the key issue has been that the government has kind of said, “Well, we can’t control the borders, what can we do?” And, since 2015, that kind of lack of control from the state has been acutely felt in areas, and also rural areas for the first time.

I was under the impression that the German center right had moved to the right on immigration policies. Is that not true?

It is true, and migration numbers have gone down massively all across Europe, but you still have people coming in every year, and the government is still not really entirely in control over who’s coming in and who’s not. People are telling me that what they want is control over this. They have absolutely no problem with a worker coming in from Turkey or wherever. But nearly half of all people who receive social welfare in Germany are non-citizens as well.

You yourself said earlier that you thought Germany needs these people for economic reasons, no?

It does, but it needs people who actually have qualifications. This is exactly the difference that people want to see, I think. The government needs to separate asylum migration from labor migration, and this is something that, I think, for too long, the parties haven’t done. And the AfD takes an extreme stance on this, which I’m not entirely convinced that all of its voters share. Some do, but I think there’s an increase recently that you can’t explain just through sheer extremism.

Do you think it is accurate to say that the AfD is further to the right than other right-wing European movements?

That’s definitely accurate. They have a very strong and large wing of people who define Germanness on ethnic grounds, and they say that the German people are dying out. That’s the kind of language that you get from them, and the way they push for this more homogeneous society is something that’s, I think, quite different from other European parties. They want to restore Germanness through “remigration,” as they call it. And you can also see this in the way that, for instance, the French far right have actually stopped collaborating with them and have distanced themselves from the AfD, because they’re too extreme for them.

When the French far right won’t collaborate with the German far right, you know the German far right has gone too far. But I want to understand what else you think the mainstream parties should be doing in terms of coalitional politics. Separate from trying to meet more voter concerns, do you think they should be working with the far right?

I haven’t got an easy answer for that, I’m afraid. I don’t think people calling this election an earthquake are wrong, or that these descriptions are overblown. The AfD has grown so large that any attempts to control them or try to get them to be moderate are tricky now because the establishment parties can’t really dictate terms. The center right got less than half of what the AfD did on Sunday. I think the only thing that I can see that counters this trend is in England, where I live, and where we’ve seen quite an interesting shift now, with Andy Burnham coming in as a new center-left Prime Minister. He is much more popular than Keir Starmer. And that’s immediately had an effect on the working-class vote, with some of that shifting back to the center left.

Yes, although it seems mostly like Burnham is getting that support from the Greens and parties to the left of Labour, rather than from Reform and the right. If you add up the Reform and Conservative vote in the polls in the U.K., it seems like right-wing support has remained pretty constant, both before and after Burnham.

Yes, that’s true. But the point is that once you get credible leadership back into the centrist parties it can make a real difference, in the sense that people might feel that they can actually get the change that they crave from the mainstream parties. In Germany, that would be quite a painful shift for both the S.P.D. and the Conservatives, because they would effectively have to admit that what they’ve done in the last few years, possibly even ten years or so, hasn’t really worked, and that they’d really have to come up with quite a radical shift. Sweden is a good example as well, or Denmark, where the center left has managed to reclaim some ground with new leadership and new messaging.

Germany does have a couple of far-left parties, and a particular far-left party, called the B.S.W., which has gone to the right on immigration. If this issue is the motivating factor, why haven’t they done better?

Yes, the B.S.W. kind of split off from the other far-left party, which also still exists. I think their problem was always that they have one leader, a very charismatic woman called Sahra Wagenknecht, whose ideas entirely dominate the Party, and that’s why they’ve come up with this really idiosyncratic mix of being socially conservative, as you say, tougher on immigration, but also being left-wing on economic issues, and being extremely pro-Russian. And I think that combination appeals only to quite a small section of voters, because it is very distinct to the woman who set up that Party, which they’re named for Wagenknecht as well. And that’s why I think they kind of failed a little bit as a political project.

I first became aware of your work when you wrote a book called “Beyond the Wall,” about East Germany. It was somewhat controversial, because some people thought you were too positive about East Germany. Without getting into that, I did want to ask about whether now, when you see some form of neo-fascist politics rising in East Germany much more than in what was formerly West Germany, has this changed anything about the way you think about East Germany, and the values it instilled in its citizens?

I think that’s a bit of a red herring, to be honest. If you zoom out just a little bit and look at places like Austria or France, you’ll find that the far right also does well or is rising. In Austria, they’re at something like thirty-eight per cent in polls at the moment. West Germany is the anomaly with that, in that it has had, I think, very positive experiences with both of the mainstream parties, and are very willing to stick with them a little bit longer.

Having said that, West Germany used to have roughly ten per cent support for the AfD in 2017, East Germany was at about twenty-two per cent, and now West Germany is at about twenty per cent and East Germany’s level of support has also almost doubled to forty-odd per cent.

So I think what we’re seeing here is that the East is a bit of a canary in the coal mine, in that it’s just got more working-class voters, it’s more rural, it has more small towns, it feels more left behind, it’s more disgruntled, and as a result of that you find that they’re just more likely to go to the AfD. Even in the 2024 European elections, the AfD already had, like, thirty-something per cent of the working-class vote.

The one thing that is distinct to the East is this pro-Russian sentiment that the AfD are also playing to. That’s very, very different than in the West. And that’s the main distinctive factor where you can look into that history and find causes for the East’s support of the AfD. East Germany had a much, much closer relationship, of course, with the Soviet Union, more cultural exchanges. I still learned Russian at school, even though I was born in the mid-eighties. The AfD says things like, “Why should we support Ukraine when that money could go into our schools or our infrastructure instead?” And that works with people.

You said the outlier in support for mainstream parties was West Germany, rather than East Germany, but you could argue that West Germany is the outlier, in part because of Germany’s experience of the Second World War and the rise of Hitler. But my understanding is that West Germany, for whatever the flaws of the country after 1945, inculcated a real sense of responsibility for the rise of the Nazis, whereas the German Democratic Republic tended to say that the rise of Nazism was also the fault of West Germany, and didn’t take responsibility in the same way.

That’s a very common way of explaining that. What I would say is that it’s mostly West German commentators and historians who argue that. Most East Germans, I think, will say that they had a very, very strong propaganda narrative in East Germany of being the anti-fascist state, and taking that very seriously. So when you look at Buchenwald concentration camp, which is just outside of Weimar, in the former East, that was made into the national memorial of the G.D.R. It was a national museum where schoolchildren had to go and see the horrors of Nazism.

There was an East German Holocaust film called “Sterne” (“Stars”). It came out in 1959 to wide acclaim and was released in dozens of countries, including the U.S., and won a prize at Cannes. It’s regarded as the first German film to address German responsibility for the Holocaust. That’s not to say memory culture didn’t differ between East and West, but to say East Germany did no reckoning of that past just isn’t true. And most people who you ask in the East today, they don’t see the AfD as a threat to democracy. That’s an important thing, I think, to understand, is that they’re not voting against democracy, or they think they’re not. What they’re saying is that they haven’t had political choice over the years, so they see their vote as a democratic expression. Support for the AfD in the East is not saying no to democracy, and I think that’s worth understanding, because, if all that people do is warn of the AfD as a threat to democracy without making a positive case for the other parties, then that’s not a compelling argument, and East German voters are far more transactional when it comes to political voting than people in the West are. You know, the mainstream parties in the West have had this long trajectory going back to Konrad Adenauer and the Christian Democratic Union being the party of the economic miracle of the fifties and sixties, and then you had the S.P.D. as the modernizer in the seventies, and that’s both positive. So you have entire families that have voted either S.P.D. or C.D.U. for generations, and they’re far more tied to those parties than people in the East who’ve only known the C.D.U. as the party that, during reunification, promised that there’d be no unemployment, and then there was twenty-per-cent unemployment after reunification.

I may have read more West German historians than historians from the East, but my understanding was that in terms of paying reparations for the Holocaust, in terms of apologizing for the Holocaust formally, the East Germans put that off as long as they could, and more simply just blamed capitalism for the rise of the Nazis, rather than the German people.

It did do all that. There were very different memory cultures; that’s absolutely right. But the Soviet Union actually took reparations from East Germany. So I think it’s far more complicated than just saying that East German voters are happy to return to fascism, because they don’t see it that way. They want a different economic policy; they want a different migration policy. The AfD is currently saying, for instance, that they want to rebuild the nuclear sector in Germany, and that would help with energy prices. They’re also promising to return to Russian gas and oil, and that would obviously also bring relief, as problematic as I find it. But most people in East Germany don’t. ♦