Germany is heading for a revolt at the ballot box

Germany is heading for a revolt at the ballot box

The AfD is projected to win Saxony-Anhalt on a program that rejects the establishment agenda, but can it beat the political firewall?
The AfD enters the Saxony-Anhalt election with a ten-point plan for rapid reform as the political establishment resorts to surveillance, raids, ban proposals, and economic threats to stop it.
A few days before the September 6 state election in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is on the verge of becoming the first party outside Germany’s postwar political cartel to govern a German state. Two months ago, at its state party conference in Magdeburg, the party presented a clear and ambitious 100-Day Program. The party entered the final days of the campaign united, confident, and focused on the concerns of ordinary German citizens. The ten-point plan offers a practical course for immediate action should the AfD assume government responsibility. It seeks to restore order and protect the homeland.
The establishment has answered this program with threats rather than arguments. The state Office for the Protection of the Constitution (a fittingly Orwellian name for such a dystopian organization) has classified the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt as a ‘confirmed right-wing extremist’ party since 2023, allowing an agency controlled by the Interior Ministry to spy on the strongest opposition party and infiltrate it with informants. Days before the vote, leading SPD (Social Democratic Party) and Green politicians renewed calls to ban the AfD’s state branches in Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg. Ten days before the election, police searched 15 properties in an investigation into the alleged continuation of Artgemeinschaft, a Germanic neo-pagan association banned in 2023 as a ‘right-wing extremist’ organization. Two AfD parliamentary candidates were among those targeted. The legal merits of the case will be decided later, but the political images were broadcast before voters enter the polling stations. The message was plain: The state will place every possible obstacle before a party it cannot defeat at the ballot box.
What are the AfD’s ten proposed measures that have caused such panic?
First, the AfD will terminate the state broadcasting treaties and begin the reform of public media. The present compulsory fee forces every household to finance television and radio organizations that regularly treat opposition to mass immigration, hysterical climate policy, European centralization, and the war course against Russia as signs of moral or political deviance. The AfD wants a leaner, cheaper, and fully transparent system that informs citizens instead of lecturing them. This proposal strikes directly at one of the establishment’s main instruments of power, which helps explain the fury it has caused.
Second, the program promises deportations from minute one. An AfD government would use every legal instrument available to ensure that people who have received orders to leave Germany are actually returned to their countries of origin. Temporary detention would prevent those scheduled for removal from disappearing before deportation. Borders must be controlled, German communities must be protected, public resources must serve those entitled to them, and laws must be enforced. A state that announces deportations but fails to carry them out teaches both citizens and foreigners that its rules are empty words. The AfD intends to end that practice immediately.
Third, asylum seekers who are allowed to remain will have to perform mandatory community service. Anyone supported by society will be expected to make a contribution to it. Centralized accommodation in suitable facilities will become the rule, while placement in private apartments will be restricted to exceptional cases. This will improve oversight, security, and the orderly administration of the asylum system while respecting the taxpayers who finance it.
Fourth, an AfD state government will redirect public money away from p