The local election in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt could very well produce the first far-right government anywhere in Germany since the Nazis. | Ronny Hartmann/AFP via Getty ImagesGermany’s local elections usually don’t matter to anyone but Germans. But Sunday’s contest in the state of Saxony-Anhalt was an exception: It could very well produce the first far-right government anywhere in Germany since the Nazis. Alternatives fur Deutschland (AfD), a party so extreme that Germany’s intelligence services put them under surveillance, won 43.8 — a plurality that puts them just shy of a majority of seats in the Saxony-Anhalt parliament. Since the election, AfD’s leadership has been negotiating with other factions to form a coalition government; it’s unclear at present how likely they are to succeed.On its own, Saxony-Anhalt is not a huge prize. A state of a little over 2 million people, it has limited significance for German politics as a whole (let alone Europe). But as a political matter, the AfD coming in first place is an earthquake: Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the result has shaken his party, the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), “to its very foundations.” With elections later this month in the states of Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, there’s rising fear that the AfD may parlay local victories into a national tidal wave.“The national debate is now one of crisis, focusing attention on the success of the AfD and the alleged reasons for it,” said Cas Mudde, an expert on European far-right parties at the University of Georgia. This, it appears, is the outcome the Trump administration has long desired. The White House has, both in public and in private, lent support to AfD. While he was in the administration last year, Elon Musk spoke at an AfD rally. Prior to the Trump administration, the US had never interfered so blatantly in a European ally’s partisan politics.As a result, the AfD’s rise is not only a critical political story in Europe, but a revealing one in America as well. In helping boost a truly extreme faction abroad, Trump is pursuing a foreign policy very different from the “America First” slogan it touts at home. The White House is dreaming of a world dominated by the far right — even if that comes at the expense of America’s geostrategic interests.What the result in Saxony-Anhalt means for Germany — and for EuropeModern German politics is in no small part built around preventing the rise of another Nazi-like party. The rise of the AfD is the greatest challenge to this mission to date.Beginning life as a Euroskeptic party, the AfD emerged as the leading critic of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open doors approach to the 2015 refugee crisis. In the 2017 national elections, it went from having zero seats in the Bundestag (Germany’s parliament) to 94. Today, it controls 151 out of 630, second only to Schulz’s CDU. National polls uniformly suggest that it would surpass the CDU if elections were held today.Typically, European far-right parties do not achieve this kind of breakthrough success without moderating at least somewhat — building a “reputational shield” that allows it to deflect allegations of racism or neo-Nazism. Yet the AfD has if anything only grown more radical over the years.Its 2025 platform calls for “remigration,” a mass deportation program primarily targeted at recent Syrians and Afghans, alongside a new, explicitly blood-based definition of German citizenship. Björn Höcke, AfD’s leader in the state of Thuringia, has been convicted twice for using a Nazi slogan in public speeches. Maximilian Krah, an AfD Bundestag member, defended members of the SS so aggressively that France’s far-right party formally split from their alliance in the European Parliament. In 2024, the German news broadcaster Tagesschau found that more than 100 AfD Bundestag staff were also members of right-wing extremist organizations (roughly 20 percent of its entire staff in the national legislature). “In the past, there have been debates over whether extremists like Höcke should be excluded from the party. You do not have these debates anymore,” Werner Krause, a political scientist at the University of Potsdam, tells me. Even more broadly, the election raises the question of whether Germany has any deeper plan for stopping the AfD’s rise.The Saxony-Anhalt branch is cut from the same cloth. Die Welt, a German newspaper, found that four top officials in the local party had been members of a banned neo-Nazi group. Reporters at the Deutsche Welle outlet saw its leader, Ulrich Siegmund, “appearing arm-in-arm with men wearing neo-Nazi attire.”The rest of Germany’s political spectrum has almost entirely banded together to try and block the AfD. They have continued a policy, called the Brandmauer or cordon sanitare, in which they collectively agree to abstain from ever forming a coalition that includes the AfD. After the last election, the CDU banded together with its traditional center-left rival, the SPD, rather than build a more consistently right-wing coalition with the second-place AfD.This approach has indeed kept the AfD out of power. But it has also made the AfD look like the only real opposition to a cross-ideological national uniparty, allowing it to become the party of protest against the status quo. As a result, the AfD has become a party not just for people who like its extreme right identity, but those who simply believe German politics isn’t working and desire a change (sound familiar?).The Saxony-Anhalt result is a crisis, in part, because it is a test of whether the Brandmauer can survive the AfD’s growing popularity. The AfD is actively courting another dissident faction, the economically-socialist-but-socially-conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), to join it in local government. If BSW agrees to be AfD’s junior partner, it will mark the formal end of Brandmauer — and the official reentry of the Nazi-adjacent far-right into polite German society.“Saxony-Anhalt is a small state, but it’s still a state,” Krause said. “They have the power to change how immigrants and asylum seekers are treated within [it].”Even more broadly, the election raises the question of whether Germany has any deeper plan for stopping the AfD’s rise. The Brandmauer is a containment strategy; it can only hold so long as the AfD is still perceived as a fringe faction. If the AfD keeps delivering strong electoral performances, this perception will be harder and harder to maintain — and the fight to prevent it from becoming a plausible governing party will eventually be lost. Which is why the upcoming elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern matter so much: They’ll give more of a sense of whether Saxony-Anhalt was an outlier or a harbinger of Germany’s future.“If they have a similar outcome, this will set the agenda for months to come,” Mudde said. “If they show a weaker AfD, there might be space for a somewhat different focus.”AfD and Trump’s identity-politics foreign policyAs if the stakes of a neo-Nazi linked party returning to power weren’t large enough, AfD’s rise also has major geopolitical implications. The party is friendly with China and especially Russia; its ascent in the European Union’s most influential member-state would be a disaster for both the Ukraine war effort and any American administration looking to keep hostile powers out of its alliance network.Which makes it somewhat odd that the Trump administration has gone to diplomatic war on the AfD’s behalf.In February 2025, Vice President JD Vance gave a speech in Munich blasting German efforts to exclude the party from power as an affront to “millions of voters.” In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the intelligence surveillance of AfD a form of “tyranny.” Later that year, the administration hosted two separate delegations from the party in Washington. And this April, the New York Times reported that Samuel Samson — a radical State Department official just five years out of college — was conducting a slate of efforts to bolster AfD and other European far-right factions.It is extremely unusual for the United States to be this involved in the domestic politics of a European ally. And it is unprecedented, at least prior to this administration, for the US to align itself with a continental faction with a record of extremism as extensive as AfD’s.Of course, it’s not uncommon for the US to back some ugly political forces in other places. But typically, the US did so because there was a clearly defined national interest — containing Communism during the Cold War, say — that compelled American leaders to set aside moral considerations and get in bed with extremists and authoritarians. For all Trump’s talk of “America First,” there’s no reason to think that an AfD victory in Germany would enhance America’s strategic position in Europe.Yet for all Trump’s talk of “America First,” there’s no reason to think that an AfD victory in Germany would enhance America’s strategic position in Europe. In fact, there are quite a few reasons to think otherwise. There is no coldly rational case for damaging relations with Germany’s current government in order to marginally-at-best increase the chances of AfD becoming the governing party down the line.The best way to think about Trump’s policy toward AfD, and Europe more broadly, is a kind of photo-negative of America’s old democracy promotion policy. In the recent past, the US would provide aid to factions in authoritarian states who wished to build US-style liberal democracy at home. Today, the US provides aid to factions in democratic states who wish to build their own versions of Trump-style far-right populist governments.The reasoning for this is purely ideological. In an essay published on the State Department’s Substack, Samson argued that European governments had launched an “aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself.” Comparing the German effort to restrict AfD’s influence to “a similar strategy of censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization…utilized against President Trump,” he argued that the United States had a moral imperative to support insurgent far-right against the “decadent governing class” reigning in Europe’s capitals.“Our concerns are not partisan but principled,” Samson writes. “A Europe that replaces its spiritual and cultural roots, that treats traditional values as dangerous relics, and that centralizes power in unaccountable institutions is a Europe less capable of standing firm against external threats and internal decay.”Lest you think this is one rogue State Department staffer, the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy comes to essentially the same conclusions. Warning of “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife,” the document predicts that “should present trends continue, [Europe] will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”Like Samson, the strategy locates the sources of this European decline in its abandonment or rejection of traditional ideas of “Western” civilization — a civilizational suicide driven primarily by mass migration. “Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” it warns.The core remedy it proposes for this malaise is “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” — basically, the current policy of aid and support for the AfD and factions like it.This is not the cold realism promised by the “America First” slogan. It is instead a kind of application of domestic culture war to global politics: a MAGA foreign policy that puts curbing immigration to “the West” and a right-wing vision of cultural identity at the heart of America’s approach to the world. This explains why, on Sunday night, Trump gleefully posted Saxony-Anhalt returns on his Truth Social page. For the White House, AfD’s victory is in a crucial way theirs.