Germany’s far-right AfD is poised for power – and split on whether to cozy up to Trump

AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt Gambit: A Path to Power Complicated by a Fractured Alliance With Washington

Healfromzero.com – The Alternative for Germany is barreling toward what would be a historic first: governing a German state outright, more than eight decades after the last far-right administration fell from power. With the Saxony-Anhalt state election scheduled for Sunday, the party enters the ballot race carrying a commanding lead in the polls. Pollster Infratest dimap projects roughly 42 percent of the vote for the AfD in the eastern state — a figure that represents a dramatic surge from the party’s support levels just a few years earlier and, if realized, would be sufficient to hand the AfD an absolute majority under Germany’s electoral rules.

Such a result would mark the first time since 1945 that a far-right formation controls a state government. The implications ripple well beyond one eastern province. A successful AfD administration in Magdeburg would shatter the postwar consensus that kept the party at the margins of formal governance, and it would hand the movement a platform from which to project its agenda nationally.

The Firewall and the Question of Coalition

Yet the road from polling numbers to actual power is not without obstacles. German intelligence agencies have formally designated the AfD as an “extremist” party, citing its rhetoric targeting Muslim citizens and its hardline immigration positions. Mainstream conservatives and progressives alike have denounced the formation, and every other party in the country observes what is known as the “firewall” — an unwritten but deeply entrenched norm against forming coalitions or cooperating in parliament with the AfD.

Should the party fall short of an absolute majority on Sunday, the remaining formations could assemble a patchwork coalition specifically designed to lock the AfD out of government in the state. That very isolation at home is one of the principal drivers pushing the party to cultivate external alliances, particularly with the MAGA movement in the United States.

Bridging to Washington: Merch, Meetings, and Mutual Amplification

The connection between the AfD and American right-wing politics extends far beyond shared ideological DNA. At AfD rallies and internal events, supporters now routinely wear caps emblazoned with the slogan “Make Germany Great Again.” The party’s co-leader Alice Weidel met US Vice President JD Vance on the margins of the Munich Security Conference last year. Before that encounter, Weidel appeared alongside Elon Musk in a livestream event hosted on his social platform, X. A small contingent of AfD politicians also traveled to Washington to attend President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

The relationship has not been one-directional. Vance seized his 2025 address in Munich to press German lawmakers to dismantle the firewall against the far-right. Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly condemned the German authorities’ decision to label the party extremist, describing the move as

“tyranny in disguise.”

A Growing Unease: When Foreign Policy Cuts Against Domestic Alignment

But the alliance is showing visible strain. As Trump’s foreign policy agenda has grown more assertive — the war in Iran, saber-rattling over Greenland, intervention in Venezuela — factions within the AfD have begun recalculating how closely they want to be associated with Washington. The German public’s view of the United States has deteriorated sharply. An ARD poll conducted in March found that 58 percent of Germans regarded the strikes on Iran as unjustified. A separate ARD survey from January showed that 72 percent of the population considered the arrest of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro unjustified.

Almut Möller, director for European and global affairs at the European Policy Centre in Brussels, characterized the dynamic as ideologically aligned but operationally complicated.

“I think there is ideological alignment on key issues, and I think the AfD is also learning from the MAGA movement,” Möller said. “Having said that, it is not a straightforward relationship to handle at all times,” she added, pointing to policies that directly affect the German economy, such as Trump’s tariff regime or fuel-price pain amid the Iran conflict.

Möller noted that the two movements converge most sharply on rhetoric about a nation’s obligation to “care about (its) own people and stop caring about everybody else” — a framing that resonates with the AfD’s domestic messaging on immigration and cultural identity.

“Remigration” and the Domestic Agenda

Back in Germany, the AfD’s campaign platform centers on what supporters call “remigration” — a program of mass deportation of migrants and refugees coupled with the expansion of large-scale detention facilities. Party officials have repeatedly deployed anti-Muslim rhetoric and have specifically named Muslim and Ukrainian residents when describing whom they intend to send home. Additional pledges include creating separate school tracks and tightening naturalization requirements.

Markus Frohnmaier, the AfD lawmaker who doubles as the party’s foreign policy spokesperson, told CNN in his Bundestag office days before the vote that he has made multiple trips to the United States this year and has built strong personal links within the MAGA ecosystem. He stressed that the two movements share substantial common ground, particularly on immigration.

What emerges from the Saxony-Anhalt result on Sunday will therefore carry weight far beyond one state’s cabinet composition. A clean AfD majority would validate the party’s strategy of pairing radical domestic populism with selective transatlantic solidarity — while simultaneously exposing the internal fault line over how much distance to keep from a president whose foreign-policy choices are increasingly unpopular with the very German voters the AfD courts.