From Karachi, I have grown used to seeing Germany’s political map divided by a border that officially disappeared in 1990. Election night brings it back. Television maps turn parts of the former East blue for the Alternative für Deutschland, while much of the old West looks different enough to sustain a comforting explanation: AfD belongs mainly to Germany’s unfinished reunification story.

Then I looked again at Baden-Württemberg. The AfD received 18.8 percent there in March 2026, almost double its 9.7 percent result five years earlier, and it captured the Mannheim I constituency. It did not win the state, but a party once explained largely through eastern German resentment had made its biggest gain of the election inside one of Germany’s richest industrial regions.

That result interests me more after what happened in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6.

Germany’s Convenient Eastern Explanation

For years, the geography of AfD support gave Germany’s political establishment an explanation that contained the problem. The former East had lived under communist rule before reunification overturned its economic order. Factories disappeared, people moved west, and the social disruption left political scars that did not vanish when roads improved or incomes later rose.

AfD strength could therefore be interpreted partly through the peculiar history of the former German Democratic Republic. The argument had substance. It also allowed western Germany to look across the old internal border and treat radical-right success as evidence of an eastern political condition rather than a national one.

Saxony-Anhalt has now pushed that interpretation close to its limit. The AfD won nearly 44 percent of the vote on September 6 and secured 39 of the state parliament’s 83 seats. It fell short of governing alone, while the CDU and other mainstream parties continued to reject cooperation with it.

Thirty-nine seats change the nature of exclusion. A party sitting at 10 percent can remain beyond the coalition system for years without paralysing it, but a party approaching half the electorate begins to reshape the mathematics around everybody else. Germany’s political firewall can still stand; maintaining it now requires increasingly difficult combinations on the other side.

Baden-Württemberg Tells a Different Story

I find Baden-Württemberg more revealing precisely because the AfD did not win there.

The Greens finished first in the March 8 state election with 30.2 percent of second votes. CDU followed at 29.7 percent. AfD came third with 18.8 percent, but its gain of 9.1 percentage points was larger than that of any other party.

Mannheim I makes the result harder to file away as merely another percentage increase. CDU won 56 of the state’s 70 constituencies and the Greens took 13, yet AfD captured Mannheim I. Turnout there was only 54.3 percent, the lowest of any constituency in Baden-Württemberg, so I would resist making one seat carry an entire national argument.

The broader voting figures matter more. Among men, AfD support reached 23.1 percent. Its strongest age group was 45 to 59, where 24.2 percent voted for the party, while support among voters aged 70 and above stood at only 10.4 percent. Those are actual voting statistics collected by the state statistical office, not a post-election opinion survey.

The old East-West explanation has not become useless. It has become insufficient.

Look Behind the Vote and You Find Factories

Baden-Württemberg changes the argument because this is not an economically abandoned region sitting on Germany’s periphery. It contains one of Europe’s great manufacturing systems. Automotive production remains its largest industrial sector, while machinery comes next, and together those two industries generated 48 percent of the state’s industrial turnover in 2025.

But the machinery underneath that prosperity has started making uncomfortable noises. Baden-Württemberg’s industrial companies lost about 30,800 employees in 2025. Automotive-sector revenue fell by €14 billion from the previous year, a decline of 10 percent, even though the industry remained the state’s largest manufacturing business.

Those figures do not prove that industrial decline caused people to vote AfD. Election behaviour rarely permits such a clean equation, and immigration remains central to the party’s appeal. Yet the figures tell us what kind of economic environment surrounded an election in which AfD almost doubled its support.

The pressure has continued beyond Baden-Württemberg. A German automotive-industry survey published in June found suppliers increasingly pessimistic, with more than half cutting jobs at home. Around two-thirds were delaying investment, cancelling it or shifting planned investment abroad.

A worker does not experience Germany’s industrial problem as a Bundesbank chart. He hears about another round of job cuts at a supplier, watches an investment go somewhere else, or wonders what electric-vehicle competition from China means for the factory that has supported his town. Political economics eventually reaches the kitchen table.

That is where the western AfD story becomes more difficult.

The Firewall Has a Mathematical Problem

Germany’s Brandmauer, the political firewall against cooperation with AfD, carries far more weight than an ordinary coalition rule. Post-war German democracy developed institutions acutely conscious of what happened when democratic parties failed to contain extremism. CDU leader and Chancellor Friedrich Merz has continued to reject cooperation with AfD even after the Saxony-Anhalt result.

The firewall does not prevent people from voting, however. Every additional AfD seat narrows the coalition combinations available to everybody else. Saxony-Anhalt demonstrates the problem in unusually stark form because AfD now holds 39 seats in a chamber of 83.

BSW complicates the calculation. Its state leadership has shown greater willingness than Germany’s established parties to consider cooperation with AfD, although substantial ideological differences remain. Both parties oppose Germany’s support for Ukraine and favour renewed ties with Moscow; they also share restrictive positions on immigration, though their political traditions are very different.

Calling the firewall dead would therefore be premature. What interests me is the political price Germany must pay to maintain it. Parties that disagree sharply on taxes or social spending can find themselves pushed toward cooperation because the alternative would bring AfD closer to power.

Voters notice arrangements made for institutional survival. Some will regard them as responsible democratic defence, while others may see proof that supposedly competing parties close ranks whenever an outsider threatens their control. AfD can exploit the second interpretation without entering a government ministry.

Now the Political Risk Reaches the Economy

Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel raised another dimension on September 10. Speaking in Berlin, he warned that the rise of the far right could damage Germany’s attractiveness to foreign investors. His concern reaches beyond AfD’s immigration policy because the party has challenged Germany’s place in the euro and supports leaving the European Union, while seeking closer relations with Moscow.

The contradiction is uncomfortable. Economic insecurity can push dissatisfied voters toward AfD, yet investors may become more cautious as the party moves closer to political power. German companies also need skilled labour while demographic ageing increases pressure on the workforce, so a harsher political climate around immigration carries an economic consequence beyond the cultural argument.

Merz already faces the connection between political weakness and economic reform. After the Saxony-Anhalt defeat, disagreements inside his governing coalition intensified over pensions and other proposed reforms, while Reuters reported concern that AfD’s momentum could make investment and skilled-worker recruitment harder.

The industrial numbers give those political arguments a harder edge. German industrial production unexpectedly fell 1.1 percent in July. A voter watching his economic security weaken may have little patience for an explanation that begins and ends with the historical peculiarities of eastern Germany.

The Old Border Explains Less Than It Used To

I would still resist putting Saxony-Anhalt and Baden-Württemberg into the same political box. AfD’s nearly 44 percent in the eastern state belongs to a different electoral scale from its 18.8 percent in Baden-Württemberg. History matters too much to erase that distinction simply because a national narrative makes a better headline.

But direction matters as much as position when a political system begins to move. AfD almost doubled its Baden-Württemberg state-election share within five years. The preceding 2025 federal election had already provided another warning: AfD received 19.8 percent of second votes in Baden-Württemberg and finished second there, more than doubling its 2021 share.

I keep looking at Mannheim for that reason. AfD does not need Stuttgart or the entire old West to reproduce Saxony-Anhalt before German politics changes; several percentage points moving across enough western constituencies would already alter the calculations facing established parties. The border that once divided two German states would remain perfectly visible in the history books while becoming progressively less useful for explaining the voters living around it.