AfD's 43.8 Percent Is Not a Deviation: It Is the Bill of a Two-Hundred-Year Line and Thirty-Five Years of Dispossession

What Grew on the Other Side of the Wall?

The roots of reaction in Germany after Saxony-Anhalt, the bankruptcy of social democracy, and the tasks of the class front

Dear Young Comrades,

When the polls opened in Magdeburg on the evening of Sunday, 6 September 2026, Germany's postwar political order crossed a threshold. In the Saxony-Anhalt state election, the AfD (Alternative for Germany) took 43.8 percent of the vote; with 39 seats in an 83-seat state parliament it fell three seats short of an absolute majority. Five years earlier it had taken 20.8 percent in the same state; it doubled its vote. The Christian Democrats (CDU) melted by half, from 37.1 percent to 17.2. The Social Democrats (SPD) took 9.3 percent, the Greens 8.9, the Left Party (Die Linke) 8.6, Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW 5.3. Turnout leapt from 60 percent to above 77 (ZDF).

Look inside the numbers and the picture grows heavier still. 61 percent of workers in the state voted AfD; in 2021 the share was a third. Nearly half of wage-earners, an absolute majority of the self-employed and small traders, an absolute majority of the 35–59 age group, 42 percent of those under 25 said AfD. The party took 170,000 votes from people who had never gone to the polls before, and 82,000 from the CDU (Tagesspiegel). 89 percent of AfD voters say they fear price rises, 80 percent losing their standard of living; 83 percent think East Germans are "still second-class citizens." That last conviction is not only among the AfD: 75 percent of Left Party voters, 68 percent of CDU voters, 65 percent of SPD voters endorse the same sentence (KAS election analysis).

Two weeks ago, in A Class Soldier in Berlin: Elif Eralp, we wrote this: September carries two possibilities to Germany at once; the first AfD state premier of the postwar period in Saxony-Anhalt, and in Berlin the daughter of a family exiled by 12 September. The first possibility is on the brink of coming true. On 20 September Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern go to the polls.

This piece tries to say why that result is not surprising. To do so we will walk a long road: from the romantic nationalism of the early nineteenth century to Nazism, from Nazism to the two Germanys, from the two Germanys to the fall of the Wall, from the fall of the Wall to the Treuhand, from the Treuhand to Rostock, and from Rostock to today's 43.8 percent. On that road we will weigh, through a class lens, the DDR's own errors, the hatred the Stasi left behind, why social democracy could not be an answer, and whether the Left Party can be a hope. At the end there are tasks, because this is not Germany's matter alone.

What was debated in a week?

The moment the result was out, four separate debates opened. Each is instructive in its own right.

First, the debate over the "impassable wall" (Brandmauer). The founding principle of postwar Germany was that the establishment parties would in no form cooperate with the far right. That wall, which cracked in January 2025 when Merz's migration motion passed with AfD votes, collapsed in practice in Saxony-Anhalt. Because the arithmetic is plain: AfD and BSW together have 44 seats, a majority. Wagenknecht said "Brandmauer politics has gone bankrupt," declared that she saw "overlaps" with the AfD on energy, Russia sanctions, education and public broadcasting; it is being said that the BSW might abstain in the third round of the premier election, and that this would elect the AfD candidate Ulrich Siegmund (ZDF). That a party labelled "left" should ease the door open to the first far-right state government of the postwar period is the week's heaviest lesson.

Second, the Merz debate. According to a ZDF poll, three-quarters of voters, and half of CDU voters, think Chancellor Merz has harmed his own party (ZDF). A wing of the CDU categorically rejects any cooperation with the Left Party; the general secretary, saying "with the extremists of neither the right nor the left," puts the Left Party on the same scale as the AfD. So the establishment party, even in the face of the far right that has melted it by half, will not give up the "left danger" reflex.

Third, the debate over the Left Party's stance. Co-chair Luigi Pantisano said, in statements before and after the election, that they could elect the CDU candidate Sven Schulze premier in order to keep the AfD from power, and apologised to the CDU for comparing its policy with the AfD; co-chair Ines Schwerdtner called the result a "reckoning with the federal government." Former Thuringia premier Bodo Ramelow called on the CDU to "stop wriggling, work with the Left Party" (WSWS). The focus of the debate inside the left is this: to prop up the establishment party in order to stop the far right, or to expose the destruction the establishment party produced and build one's own line? We will come back to this question below.

Fourth, international reactions. Trump said "they're rising and they won't put up with it any more"; Musk wrote "gute Arbeit" in German; Orbán said "this is only the beginning"; the leaders of Vox and Chega congratulated; a Russian state-fund manager declared Siegmund "the voice of reason." On the other side France called it "a very worrying signal," and Polish prime minister Tusk said "in Poland only fools or traitors rejoice at an AfD victory" (Al Jazeera). Note: those congratulating are the US president, the world's richest man, a former prime minister of an EU member state, and Russian capital. The far right is no longer "marginal"; it is a programme represented inside the blocs of global capital.

The common lack in these four debates is that all of them treat the far right as a deviation, an anomaly. The foundation analyses published since election night (the Adenauer Foundation, the Böll Foundation) count pages of "disappointment," "identity anxiety," "distrust of institutions"; in none of them does the word "property" appear. In June, in The Masters' Ideological Siege, we described how this apparatus works: detecting the destruction the system produces as if it were outside the system, with empirical data, then seeking the solution again inside the system. To read the AfD as "democracy's problem of resilience" is exactly this whitewashing operation. History, however, says this is not a deviation but a continuity.

The long road: the birth of racist politics in Germany from 1806 to 1933

Racist politics in Germany did not begin with Hitler. Nazism was the most concentrated and bloodiest form of an accumulation more than a century old. We can follow that accumulation through four stations.

The Napoleonic defeat and the "spirit of the people" (1806–1819)

Modern German nationalism is the product not of a victory but of a defeat. When the Prussian army broke before Napoleon at Jena in 1806, the German lands were a geography divided into more than three hundred petty principalities, inside feudal relations, without industry and without a nation. Against the universalist idea of citizenship of the French Revolution, the German romantics built an identity resting on the "spirit of the people" (Volksgeist), on language, blood and soil. Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation (1808), Jahn's gymnastics movement, Arndt's poems "Where is the German's fatherland?": all of them defined the nation not as a political contract but as a natural organism. Inside that definition the "foreigner" was there from the start: French, Jew, Slav.

The idea turned quickly into action. The Hep-Hep pogroms, which began in Würzburg in the summer of 1819 and spread to every German city, were modern Europe's first organised antisemitic street violence. The point to note: the social base of this violence was artisans, small traders and students; that is, the intermediate strata crushed under commercial capitalism's first shock, who embodied that crushing in a "foreigner." Two hundred years later, when we look at fascism's social base, we will see the same strata.

The defeat of 1848 and the "German special path"

The revolution of 1848 was the chance history gave to found bourgeois democracy in Germany. The German bourgeoisie did not use that chance; fearing the proletariat, it compromised with the Prussian monarchy and the landed aristocracy (the Junkers). Marx and Engels exposed this cowardice step by step in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The result was that unity was founded not from below and democratically, but in 1871 "by iron and blood," from above and by Bismarck's hand.

This is the fundamental structural feature of German reaction: capitalism developed without democracy. The industrial bourgeoisie took economic power and left political power to the Junkers and the army. Society was organised not as a community of citizens but as the subjects of a state–army–industry bloc. That even today the concept of "reason of state" (Staatsräson) has the power to end political debate in Germany is the remnant of this tradition.

Industrialisation, crisis and the politicisation of antisemitism (1873–1914)

The stock-market crash of 1873 (the "Gründerkrach") was Germany's first great capitalist crisis. The crisis crushed the intermediate strata of a rapidly industrialising society (small traders, artisans, peasants, lower officials). These strata could not grasp the abstract capital relation that was crushing them; they looked for a concrete face for it and found one: "Jewish finance." In 1879 Wilhelm Marr coined the word "antisemitism" and founded the first antisemitic political association. In the same year Prussia's most respected historian, Heinrich von Treitschke, wrote "the Jews are our misfortune"; sixty years later that sentence would be the masthead of every issue of the Nazi paper Der Stürmer. Court preacher Adolf Stoecker founded the Christian Social Party to pull workers away from social democracy, and used antisemitism openly as "an instrument for drawing the working class away from socialism."

Do not forget this: in Germany modern racism was politicised as a conscious alternative to the socialist organisation of the working class. That is why August Bebel called antisemitism "the socialism of fools": to look for the cause of exploitation not in a class relation but in a people is to direct anger not to the right address but to the easy one. The definition we gave last month in What Is This Thing Called Racism? holds here too: racism is a system of thought and practice produced not to explain the difference among people but to legitimise the inequality among them. Between the Berlin of 1879 and the Zonguldak of 2026 the mechanism has not changed.

In the same period racism found a field of application in the colonies. In 1904–1908, in what is today Namibia, the German army committed the twentieth century's first genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples; General von Trotha's extermination order, the tens of thousands driven into the desert, the concentration camps. The genocide techniques of the twentieth century were rehearsed not in Europe but in a German colony.

Weimar: capital, the army and fascism (1918–1933)

The November Revolution of 1918 brought down the empire, but social democracy crushed the revolution together with the army and the Freikorps. In January 1919 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were killed by paramilitary units summoned by the SPD government. The Weimar Republic was founded on that blood: a republic in which the army and the bureaucracy were not purged, Junker property was preserved, and the "stab in the back" (Dolchstoß) lie seeped into the state's official history.

When the crisis of 1929 came, this republic had no answer to give the working class. Six million unemployed, collapsing intermediate strata, a youth that had lost hope. The NSDAP, a marginal party that took 2.6 percent in 1928, rose to 37.3 percent in July 1932. But it did not come to power by the ballot: it had lost votes in the November 1932 election. It came to power by appointment, on 30 January 1933, through the petition industrialists and bankers wrote to Hindenburg in November 1932, through the mediation of Papen and the Junker circle. Krupp, Thyssen, IG Farben, Deutsche Bank: when German monopoly capital needed a state that would crush the labour movement and build an armaments economy, it preferred fascism.

Georgi Dimitrov's definition at the Comintern in 1935 still holds: fascism in power is "the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, most imperialist elements of finance capital." Fascism's social base is the petty bourgeoisie, lumpen strata and the despairing sections of the working class; but its class function is monopoly capital's crisis management. When these two levels are confused, fascism cannot be understood. To brand the worker who votes AfD today a "fascist" is to confuse the base with the function.

There is a further lesson: in 1933 the labour movement was split. The SPD and the KPD called each other "social fascist" and "traitor to the working class." The combined vote of both was larger than the NSDAP's. Because a united front could not be built, both went to the same concentration camp.

After 1945: two Germanys, two antifascisms

When the war ended Germany was divided in two, and each Germany settled accounts with fascism in a different way. Both accounts remained incomplete; but the quality of the incompleteness differed, and to understand today's picture that difference must be seen.

The West: restoration without denazification

In the Federal Republic, denazification was in practice over before 1949 arrived. Once the Cold War began, the US priority was not to try Nazis but to build a front-line state against the Soviets. Hans Globke, the official commentator on the Nuremberg Laws, became Adenauer's state secretary in the chancellery. Nazi Party member Kurt Georg Kiesinger became chancellor in 1966. In the judiciary, the police, the foreign service, the university and company boards, the cadres of the Nazi period stayed in place. IG Farben was broken up but lived on as BASF, Bayer and Hoechst; Krupp and Thyssen returned to their old strength within a few years.

West Germany's antifascism rested on the doctrine of "totalitarianism": Nazism and communism were put on the same scale, the KPD was banned in 1956, and in 1972 the "radicals decree" removed leftists from public service. Thus antifascism was turned into a weapon against the left. Today's sentence from the CDU general secretary, "the extremists of neither the right nor the left," is nothing but a repetition of this seventy-year doctrine. The doctrine is still at work: as we wrote in June in The Ulm 5 Trial, five young people trying to stop drone production for Gaza at the Elbit Systems factory in Ulm are being tried in Stuttgart-Stammheim behind bulletproof glass cages, under the "criminal organisation" article (§129); hearings have been extended into 2027. The same state watches a state government being formed with the party that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution calls a "confirmed far-right" organisation. The state that destroyed the files of the neo-Nazi NSU and puts the young person who stopped an arms factory into a glass cage is the same state; "reason of state" is precisely the name of this asymmetry.

On this ground the far right never disappeared: the NPD entered seven state parliaments in 1966–68; in the 1980s the Republikaner took 7.5 percent in Berlin; the "guest workers" who came under labour agreements signed with Italy in 1955 and Turkey in 1961 became the target of the slogan "foreigners out" with the 1973 oil crisis. West Germany's "economic miracle" did not abolish this racism; it merely bought it off: so long as crisis did not come, prosperity suppressed the anger.

The East: nationalised antifascism

The DDR, by contrast, founded itself as the opposite of Nazism and did so on paper far more thoroughly. Junker property was liquidated by the 1945–46 land reform; large industry was nationalised; Nazi cadres were largely cleared from the judiciary, education and administration; Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen became national memorial sites; antifascism was a compulsory curriculum in schools. In tearing out fascism's class roots (monopoly, Junker, army), the DDR did what the West did not.

But there is a problem here, and young comrades cannot look away from it: the DDR's antifascism was an antifascism commanded from above (verordneter Antifaschismus). The state declared the people wholesale "victims and victors of fascism." This exempted millions of ordinary Germans who had supported, fought for, or remained silent under Nazism for twelve years from facing their own past. Confrontation became a state ritual; and the ritual, together with the anger felt toward the state that performed it, lost its standing. When the state collapsed in 1989, the state's antifascism collapsed with it; underneath there was unworked ground.

The second problem concerns migrants. In the DDR some 90,000 workers from Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, Cuba and Poland worked under the status of "contract worker" (Vertragsarbeiter). These workers lived under a regime of separate hostels, isolated from society, forbidden to bring family, deported if they became pregnant, sent home when the contract ended. This gulf between official "internationalism" and everyday isolation meant that East German society arrived at 1989 without having built any real relation with the migrant. In 1990 most of these workers were packed off in haste; those who remained became the first targets of the pogroms in Hoyerswerda and Rostock.

The DDR's errors and the hatred the Stasi left behind

A socialist has to speak honestly about the DDR. Otherwise the job of telling this history is left to the AfD and the liberals, and they tell it as it suits them.

The DDR was founded in the Soviet occupation zone, in a geography the war had burned and wrecked, whose industry had largely been dismantled and taken as reparations, which had no share in the West's Marshall Plan. Under those conditions, full employment, free education and health care, world records in women's employment (90 percent of women were working in 1989), nurseries, social housing, rent control: these gains were real. To belittle them is not to understand what the eastern worker who votes AfD today is nostalgic for.

But these gains were distributed by the hand of a bureaucratic apparatus, not of a democratic workers' power. And bureaucracy thought it owed its gains not to the people but to itself. We can list the errors as follows:

17 June 1953. Construction workers in East Berlin struck against the raising of work norms; the strike spread across the country. A "workers' state" crushed a workers' strike with Soviet tanks. This date is the moment the DDR's relation with the working class broke. Brecht's bitter irony is famous: "Would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?"

13 August 1961. The Wall was built under the name "antifascist protective wall," but its face was turned not to the West but to its own people. To lock a society in so that it cannot leave is the confession that its consent has not been won.

Economic stagnation. From the 1970s on the DDR entered a consumption race with the West and lost; it went into debt, could not invest, fell behind technologically. Planning, without participation from below, was reduced to target figures given from above. Property the people do not call "ours" cannot live as public property.

The Stasi. The Ministry for State Security in 1989 employed some 91,000 full-time officers and 170,000–190,000 "unofficial informants" (IMs). In a country of sixteen million, that means one in every fifty to sixty adults was watching a neighbour, a workmate, a spouse for the state. Laid end to end, the Stasi's files would stretch more than a hundred kilometres. This apparatus did not protect the DDR from the West; it separated the DDR from its own people. It rotted social trust. It ended the career of anyone who objected, kept their child out of university, broke their marriage, tore their spirit apart ("Zersetzung" was the official name of a method).

If you want to understand why, in part of East Germany today, the word "left" stirs hatred, look at the Stasi. One of the AfD's most effective slogans is the theft of 1989's slogan "We are the people" (Wir sind das Volk). The same party, with the analogies "green-left dictatorship," "public broadcasting = state propaganda," "reason of state = Politburo," succeeds in directing the anger felt toward the DDR onto today's establishment parties and the left. In East Germany the left has for thirty-five years first had to clean the Stasi's shadow; only then can it begin the class struggle.

The lesson to be drawn is plain: socialism cannot live without democracy. A social order built by surveillance, fear and command collapses at the first moment of crisis and leaves behind a hatred not of socialism but of socialism's name. This lesson is addressed not only to the DDR but to every state that today enlarges surveillance in the name of "security," and to every organisation that suspends internal democracy in the name of "discipline."

The Wall fell, the East was sold: the Treuhand and dispossession

When the Wall fell on 9 November 1989, the world was told of "the victory of freedom." From the East German worker's eye, what followed was not a liberation but an annexation and a liquidation.

On 1 July 1990 monetary union was declared: the DDR mark was converted one-to-one into the western mark, with no regard to the difference in productivity. This zeroed the East's industry's competitive power overnight; eastern products became unsaleable even in their own market. Then the Treuhandanstalt went into action. This agency took over the DDR's entire public property (some 8,500 enterprises, 4 million employees, most of the country's land and forest) and liquidated it by 1994. The figures are terrible: employment in the enterprises the Treuhand took over fell from 4 million to 1.5 million; more than 85 percent of enterprises were sold to West German or foreign capital, the share sold to East Germans remaining around five percent. Factories to which the people had given forty years of labour were sometimes sold for one mark and then shut, because the buyer was buying not the factory but the market. A whole chemical triangle (Leuna, Buna, Bitterfeld), the industrial heart of Saxony-Anhalt, went dark in a few years. Treuhand president Detlev Rohwedder was assassinated in 1991; Birgit Breuel, who succeeded him, sped up the liquidation.

This was not a "transition pain"; it was the dispossession of a class from a whole region. It was what Marx called primitive accumulation restaged, at the end of the twentieth century, in the middle of a developed capitalist country.

The results are still measurable today:

Migration. Between 1989 and 2010 some 3.7 million people went from East to West, 2.5 million came; the net loss is over 1.2 million. Those who left were the young and women. Saxony-Anhalt's population was 2.9 million in 1990; today it is under 2.1 million. What remained was an ageing, male-heavy, rural population. Even the demographic structure is the trace of dispossession.

Wages and wealth. Wages in the East are still 15–20 percent below the West; household wealth is around half the West's. Not one of the forty large DAX companies has its headquarters in the East. The owners of large enterprises in the East, the boards, the court presidents, the university rectors are largely western. Thirty-five years on, the East still carries the structure of an internal colony: labour there, property and decision here.

"Second-class citizen." We saw above: voters of every party endorse this sentence. This is not a "feeling"; it is a property relation reflected in political consciousness.

Ostalgie: nostalgia for what?

Western media mock East Germans' nostalgia for the DDR (Ostalgie): the Trabant, the Spreewald pickle, Sandmännchen. The mockery is there to hide the class content of the nostalgia. What the East German worker lost in 1989 was not the product they received but their job, their nursery, their rent, their neighbourhood, their neighbour, and the feeling of belonging to something built by their own labour. In DDR surveys the things most missed come out as "job security," "social solidarity" and "equality of women and men." These are not "totalitarian nostalgia"; they are the names of class gains that were lost.

The problem is this: this nostalgia had no political language. Because of the DDR's own errors the word "socialism" had lost its standing, and the West's "totalitarianism" discourse had sealed that loss of standing. When nostalgia could not find a left language in which to speak, it flowed to the right: "there used to be order," "everyone used to work," "there used to be no foreigners." What the AfD does is to turn a class nostalgia into a cultural nostalgia, to turn "I lost my job" into "I lost my country."

The baseball-bat years: pogroms and the state's answer

The political bill of dispossession was not long in coming. The early 1990s in East Germany are remembered as the "baseball-bat years" (Baseballschlägerjahre): neo-Nazi gangs took the streets, migrant hostels were firebombed, left-wing youth and punks were beaten, killed.

September 1991, Hoyerswerda. In this industrial town in Saxony the hostels of Vietnamese and Mozambican contract workers and of refugees were stoned and firebombed for days; hundreds of townspeople applauded. The police evacuated the migrants from the town. Neo-Nazis celebrated: "Hoyerswerda has been cleansed of foreigners."

22–26 August 1992, Rostock-Lichtenhagen. The largest pogrom of postwar Germany. The "Sunflower House," where Vietnamese workers lived, was firebombed for days to the applause of thousands; the police withdrew; more than a hundred people were trapped inside and saved their lives by fleeing over the roof. The whole event was broadcast live.

November 1992 Mölln, May 1993 Solingen. This time in the West, the homes of families from Turkey were burned; three people in Mölln, five in Solingen, died alive. The violence was not peculiar to the East; but in the East it had become mass.

The state's answer is instructive. While migrants were being burned in the street, the Bundestag, on 26 May 1993, with SPD votes as well, passed the "asylum compromise" (Asylkompromiss), which in practice abolished the constitution's asylum article. That is, against racist violence the state protected not the migrant but the demand of racist violence. This is the first great proof that the far right can have its programme implemented without coming to power, and it is the rehearsal, thirty years earlier, of today's Brandmauer debate.

Between 2000 and 2007 the neo-Nazi NSU cell killed ten people, nine of them of migrant origin; for years the state investigated the victims' families and destroyed intelligence files. 2019 Halle, 2020 Hanau. Institutional racism is the name of the thing that was let in at the door in 1993.

How did the AfD grow? From a professors' party to a "racist mass party"

The AfD was born in 2013 as a liberal-conservative party founded by West German economics professors against the euro. With the refugee movement of 2015 the founding cadre was purged; in the East, along Björn Höcke's "Wing" (Flügel) line, the party turned into an openly völkisch-nationalist party. It entered the Bundestag in 2017; in 2024 it became the first party in Thuringia; in the February 2025 federal election it was second with 20.8 percent; in May 2025 the Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the party as a whole as "confirmed far-right." The Saxony-Anhalt organisation had already been inside that classification for years (NPR).

Jan Ole Arps's assessment in analyse & kritik after 6 September is apt: the AfD is no longer a protest party but "a racist mass party" (rassistische Volkspartei). A third of its voters vote because they believe in the programme, a third because the party has "normalised," a third to "teach a lesson." The party binds the fear of prices to the demand for migration restriction in a single package (ak). In the sentence of Rainer Benecke, an analyst close to the Left Party: the AfD "shifts the distribution conflict from the capital–labour relation onto a culture war between 'ordinary citizens' and 'elites and migrants'" (links-bewegt).

This is exactly what Stoecker tried to do in 1880: to show the worker a "foreigner" in order to pull them from socialism. A hundred and forty years later the same mechanism is working in the same geography, with the same class function. The difference is this: this time there is no strong socialist labour movement opposite it.

The AfD's success in the East has four material grounds:

First, dispossession: the deindustrialisation and internal-colony structure the Treuhand created. That 89 percent of AfD voters fear they cannot pay the bill is not an abstract "anxiety"; in June, in The Surplus Value on the Thermometer, while listing Europe's conditions, we showed that more than a hundred thousand people a year on this continent die extra deaths because of structural inequality, and that these deaths follow the class map one to one. East Germany is a dark region of that map. Second, the left language the DDR discredited: nostalgia flowing to the right. Third, racism without migrants: the foreign-born share in Saxony-Anhalt is far below the German average; racism there is fed not by everyday experience but by an identity payment put in the place of what was lost. Fourth, the establishment parties' cooperation: every migration restriction, every deportation package from 1993 to today made the AfD's language "reasonable." You cannot produce the disease and sell the medicine.

In the Elif Eralp piece we listed the four mechanisms by which racism is fed: the splitting of labour-power by legal status, the turning of anger away from above and sideways, the false compensation of dispossession with the privilege of "being native," and the state's normalisation from above. Saxony-Anhalt is the laboratory in which all four work in their purest form; and in a place where there is almost no migrant population. This is the empirical proof that racism is about exploitation, not about the migrant.

Why could social democracy not be an answer?

The SPD took 9.3 percent in Saxony-Anhalt; it was a government partner and won nothing. This is not an accident. Social democracy's inability to answer the far right in Germany has three historical layers.

1914 and 1919. The SPD abandoned internationalism by voting for war credits, and abandoned the revolution by crushing the Spartacists. These two choices made it permanently "the left wing of the order": aspiring to manage the capitalist order, not to surpass it. In 1933 this stance did not save it either.

1959 Godesberg. With the Godesberg Programme the SPD officially left Marxism and the identity of a class party; it became a "people's party." This worked in the period of prosperity; but when the source of prosperity ran out the party had no programme left to offer the working class.

2003–2005 Agenda 2010 and Hartz IV. The Schröder government (SPD–Greens) applied the greatest social-destruction package in German history: unemployment benefit was cut to one year, after which it was tied to Hartz IV at the poverty line, a duty to accept any job was introduced, the low-wage sector exploded, subcontracting and temporary work were normalised. Today one in five employees in Germany is in the low-wage sector. This package is the blow that broke the working class's tie to the SPD. Oskar Lafontaine's leaving the SPD and founding the Left Party with the PDS in 2007 is a direct product of Hartz IV.

In July, in From the Nuremberg Stage to NATO's Barricades, we said this: social democracy, by impoverishing the working class with neoliberalism, itself produces the despair that fascism exploits and opens the road to it. The road from Hartz IV to Saxony-Anhalt is the proof of that sentence.

Today the SPD, as Merz's coalition partner, approves the armaments budget, signs social cuts, passes deportation packages, and then gives the AfD a "lesson in democracy." The worker in Saxony-Anhalt is not listening to that lesson; because one does not take lessons from the hand that signed the cut. The reason social democracy cannot be an answer is not moral but structural: a party that aspires to manage the capitalist order cannot, in that order's crisis, offer the worker anything other than that order. The far right, at least, promises to change something; even if it is a lie, even if it is dangerous.

The Brandmauer strategy went bankrupt from the same structural limit. It is not possible for a bloc that applies the same thing as the far right in a "reasonable" form to build a wall around the far right; the wall is being pierced at its own gate. Fortune's headline, in its own words: "Germany built a 'firewall' so the far-right could never take power again. It just failed in Saxony-Anhalt" (Fortune). The wall collapsed because there was no class alternative behind the wall.

Can the Left Party be a hope? A class weighing

This question must be answered not with "yes" or "no" but by listing the conditions.

In its favour

The Left Party came back from the dead in the 2025 federal election and took 8.8 percent; it is on the way to being the first party in Berlin; membership has risen above a hundred thousand, its base has grown younger and more female. On rent struggle, socialisation, a social budget against armament, voting rights for migrant labour, it is the only class voice in the German parliament. The only party that named what is happening in Gaza a genocide. Even in Saxony-Anhalt it is the second party among those under 25, with 18 percent; it won three direct constituencies. So among young urban labourers there is a hope, and that hope is not empty.

Against it

But in the East's worker that hope is absent. The Left Party in Saxony-Anhalt, at 8.6 percent, even receded from 2021. While 61 percent of the working class in the East goes to the AfD, the party that ought to be that worker's "own" party cannot even take a tenth. There are four reasons:

The PDS inheritance. The Left Party comes from the PDS, the continuation of the DDR's ruling party, the SED. This allowed it in the 1990s to be the East's "social defence party" against the Treuhand destruction; but it also carried the Stasi's shadow to today. The AfD uses the "Stasi party" label at every opportunity.

Its record as a governing partner. Wherever the PDS/Left Party entered government it became a partner in cuts. In Berlin the 2002–2011 SPD–PDS senate sold 65,000 public housing units (GSW) to private capital; that sale is one of the foundation stones of today's rent disaster. In Thuringia the Ramelow government carried out deportations. The eastern worker did not forget this: when the "left" came to power it did the same thing.

The BSW split. Wagenknecht's leaving at the end of 2023 and founding her own party in 2024 tore the East's "social-conservative" worker base from the party. The BSW today is easing the door open to the AfD; that is, that base was taken in a left language and delivered to the right.

The tendency to lean toward the CDU. After the election the co-chair's saying they could elect the CDU candidate premier, and apologising to the CDU, gives exactly the picture the AfD wants: "They're all the same, they're all together, the only alternative is us." Keeping the AfD from power is a legitimate concern; but to do it by propping up the party of the Treuhand, Hartz IV and the deportation packages is to feed the far right. It is the left version of the error the SPD made in 1993.

The class conclusion

The Left Party is not, by itself, a hope; but it is one of the positions from which a class front can be built. The hope is not in the party but in the organisation growing under and outside the party: in tenants' committees, in the strike preparations at the base of IG Metall and ver.di (factory actions on 21 September, rallies in fourteen cities on 26 September), in migrant workers' associations such as DİDF, in neighbourhood solidarities. So long as the party is the political expression of this organisation, it is hope; the moment it puts this organisation on the table of a bargain with the CDU, it is disappointment. The measure is not with whom it sits in parliament but with whom it walks in the factory and the neighbourhood.

Benecke's sentence is right at this point: the left should stop giving the worker moral lessons and "organise concrete improvements in everyday life and make common power liveable again." The East German worker has for thirty-five years lived their own power nowhere. Their factory was sold, their town emptied, their child went west, their voice was heard nowhere. Telling them "don't be racist" does not work. What is needed is to offer them a struggle in which they will feel their own power again.

Two programmes, two answers

Two answers are being given to the same destruction. The difference is not moral; it is of class.

Problem	The AfD's answer	The class front's answer
Deindustrialisation in the East, factory closures	"The green transition and migrants finished industry"	Calling the Treuhand to account; public investment and reindustrialisation under workers' control
The feeling of "second-class citizen"	"Western elites and foreigners look down on the East"	Naming the property relation that made the East an internal colony; organising eastern labour against western capital
Prices, rent, fear of making ends meet	"Social benefits go to the migrant"	A rent cap, socialisation of housing monopolies, a social budget instead of an armaments budget
Nostalgia for the DDR	"There used to be order, there were no foreigners" — turning class nostalgia into cultural nostalgia	Job security, nurseries, rent control, solidarity: demanding back the lost gains under their class name
The Stasi and the surveillance inheritance	"Green-left dictatorship," "state media" — directing DDR anger onto today's left	An open reckoning with the DDR's errors; the defence of a socialism without surveillance, democratic; exposing today's state surveillance as well
Migration and asylum	Deportation, "remigration," abolition of the right of asylum	Organising migrant and native workers in the same union; voting rights for all; defence of the right of asylum
War and Russia	Closeness to Russia, distance from NATO — but with its own militarism	Against all imperialist blocs; not armament but a social budget; against war and genocide everywhere, including Gaza
The address of anger	The one below against the one below: horizontal	From below upward: from the labourer to capital, vertical
Form of organisation	A leader on TikTok, a spectator at the ballot	Union, tenants' committee, association, neighbourhood: the place where the class lives its own power

In a single sentence: the AfD shows the worker the Treuhand dispossessed not the dispossessor but the neighbour. The class front's job is to turn the finger the right way.

Why is this our matter?

Dear young comrades, this picture in Germany is not the internal affair of a distant country; for three reasons it is directly ours.

First, nearly three million people of Turkish origin live in Germany; those burned in Solingen and Mölln, those shot in Hanau, were our people. The AfD's "remigration" programme targets them directly. And inside this community too there is a right-wing nationalist tendency that says "they don't touch us, the problem is the refugees"; that tendency does not see the noose it has put around its own neck.

Second, the rise of European reaction feeds reaction in Turkey as well. Orbán, Vox, Chega, the AfD and the ruling bloc in Turkey are not enemies of one another; they are parts of the same ecosystem: they speak the same language in hostility to migrants, in attacks on women's rights, in hostility to unions, in the doctrine of "reason of state," in the surveillance state. The "left"-looking versions of refugee-hatred in Turkey are also a translation of the AfD's language.

Third, the lessons are universal. What the Treuhand did to East Germany, privatisations did to Turkey: SEKA, Sümerbank, TEKEL, the sugar factories, Etibank. In Turkey too whole towns were deindustrialised, the worker there too lived their own power nowhere, and the anger there too flowed to the right. The DDR's lesson is ours as well: an order built by surveillance produces hatred; this lesson holds for today's surveillance state in Turkey, and for our own internal workings. The bankruptcy of social democracy is ours as well: an opposition that aspires to manage the capitalist order cannot, in that order's crisis, offer the worker anything other than that order; we made this finding for Turkey as well a week ago, on the occasion of Evrim Ağacı's opposition video.

Knowledge Commons' racism line

This piece does not stand in a vacuum; it is built on a line we wove across the blog through the summer. Let us gather that line for young comrades, because the material for reading the picture in Germany together with Turkey is there.

What Is This Thing Called Racism? (26 August) is this piece's conceptual ground. There we wrote that racism is not a biological but a social relation; that violence against Kurdish and migrant agricultural workers in Turkey is not an identity conflict but a wage pressure running through the reserve army of labour; that in Zonguldak the villager who threw the stone and the worker who was stoned are of the same class. The sentence there holds for Germany too: "The perpetrator's courage comes from the state's language." The relation between the police withdrawing in Rostock and the abolition of the right of asylum in 1993 is the same as the relation between a governor's statement in Turkey saying "an isolated incident" and the next attack. Marx's sentence, which we cited there, also points to the same place: labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself while labour in a black skin is branded.

From the Fields of Kırşehir to the Streets of Bağbaşı (3 August) told of the dispossessed Abdals being squeezed into the ghettos of Bağbaşı and Çukurçayır, and of how, in an Anatolian city emptied by the collapse of agriculture, chauvinist symbols seized the desire for solidarity. When you read Saxony-Anhalt's emptying towns, think of Kırşehir: the same demographic collapse, the same youth migration, the same taking refuge in the privilege of "being native."

Truth Seeping Through the Smoke: The Sivas Massacre (1 July) showed how a pogrom works under state watch in Turkey; there is a year between Rostock-Lichtenhagen and Madımak, and in both the police "watched." A TKP Reality: Left-Chauvinism (14 August) exposed the "left"-looking form of racism: a left that rejects the Kurdish people's democratic demands as an "imperialist project" and packages refugee-hatred as "patriotism" is BSW's counterpart in Turkey, and it makes the AfD's work easier.

A Class Soldier in Berlin: Elif Eralp (29 August) is this piece's direct predecessor: the post-Wall balance sheet, the four mechanisms of racism, the structural bankruptcy of the Brandmauer, and DİDF's forty-five years of organised accumulation were told there. A Communist Traveler in Berlin (21 July) told the city's layers; The Ulm 5 Trial (22 June) the German state's "reason of state" against the left; From the Nuremberg Stage to NATO's Barricades (5 July) that fascism is capital's rational preference at the moment of crisis; The Palantir Manifesto (11 August) and From Futurism to Techno-Fascism (7 September) the techno-fascist programme behind Musk's "gute Arbeit" congratulations. The Surplus Value on the Thermometer (28 June) exposed Europe's class map, and The Masters' Ideological Siege (5 June) the whitewashing apparatuses that make that map invisible.

The common thesis of these pieces is a single sentence: racism is not an error of ideas but a class function; therefore it is defeated not by morals but by organisation. Saxony-Anhalt is this thesis's largest-scale confirmation.

Concrete tasks: for a real class front

Define fascism by its function, not by its base. To brand the worker who votes AfD a "fascist" is to hand them to the AfD. The base must be won, the function (monopoly capital's crisis management) exposed. Read Dimitrov again.
Turn anger vertical, not horizontal. In every debate a single question: "Who closed the factory, who raised the rent, who signed the cut?" The answer is never "the migrant." To ask this question is the most effective single sentence against racism.
Not a moral lesson, an experience of power. Telling the dispossessed worker "don't be racist" does not work; what is needed is to offer a struggle in which they will live their own power: a tenants' committee, workplace organisation, neighbourhood solidarity. People are transformed where they live power.
Neither defend nor sell the DDR. Own its gains (full employment, nurseries, rent control, women's employment); openly accept its errors (17 June, the Wall, the Stasi, the absence of democracy). A left that does not make this reckoning leaves history to the AfD.
Oppose surveillance everywhere. The Stasi's lesson holds for every state that enlarges surveillance in the name of "security" and every organisation that suspends internal democracy in the name of "discipline." Socialism does not live without democracy; apply this principle in our own organisations as well.
Do not prop up social democracy; build an alternative. It may be necessary to vote for the establishment party to stop the far right; but to share the establishment party's programme is to feed the far right. That is the lesson of 1993, of Hartz IV, and of January 2025. Stand against the Left Party's tendency to lean toward the CDU, comradely but openly.
Bring migrant and native workers together in the same organisation. In Germany, DİDF and the unions' migrant commissions have been doing this work for forty-five years. In Turkey too, putting the refugee worker and the worker from Turkey into the same union, the same association, is the only real answer to refugee-hatred.
Call privatisation to account. What the Treuhand did in East Germany, privatisations did in Turkey. Compile, in your own town, the story of every factory that was closed, every public enterprise that was sold; see where the anger there has flowed, and turn it to the right address.
Read European reaction and Turkish reaction together. Analyse the AfD, Orbán, Vox and the ruling bloc in Turkey not separately but as a single ecosystem. That the world's richest man said "gute Arbeit" to the result in Magdeburg is not an accident; the same capital finds and feeds its own reaction in every country.
Watch 20, 21 and 26 September. The Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern elections, IG Metall's factory actions and the anti-cuts rallies in fourteen cities fall in the same week. The ballot and the street are not alternatives to each other; what will protect the result at the ballot is the power in the street. Support our comrades in Germany in this week; make contact with the association, union and campaign networks there.

Dear Comrades,

43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt is not a deviation. It is today's stop on a single line that runs from the artisans stoning a Jewish shop in Würzburg in 1819, from a professor saying "the Jews are our misfortune" in 1879, from the industrialists writing to Hindenburg in 1933, from the tanks being driven at workers in 1953, from the Wall falling in 1989, from the Treuhand being founded in 1990, from the building burned to applause in Rostock in 1992, from the SPD abolishing the right of asylum in 1993, from Hartz IV in 2005, and from Merz's motion passing with AfD votes in 2025.

The one thing that does not change along this line is this: at every moment of crisis the ruling class showed the worker not their exploiter but their neighbour; and each time, opposite this, it found a left that was either split or a partner of the order.

The line can be broken; the lesson of 1933 also says that it must be broken as far as it can be. This week in Germany the ballot, the factory and the square were written onto the same calendar. In Turkey the same calendar is running. The roots of reaction are common, the tasks are common, the front too must be common.

What grew in thirty-five years on the other side of the Wall is the unorganised anger of a dispossessed class. To organise that anger is our work; if we do not organise it, who organises it is clear.

Comradely.

Sources

Election results and debates (September 2026)

"Wahl in Sachsen-Anhalt: AfD liegt klar vor CDU", ZDFheute, 6 September 2026 — zdfheute.de
"AfD mobilisiert Nichtwähler: Und fast zwei Drittel der Arbeiter in Sachsen-Anhalt wählen AfD", Tagesspiegel, 7 September 2026 — tagesspiegel.de
Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, "Wahlanalyse der Landtagswahl Sachsen-Anhalt am 6. September 2026" — kas.de
Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Brussels, "2026 Saxony-Anhalt state election", 8 September 2026 — eu.boell.org
"Sachsen-Anhalt: Wie gefährlich wird das Ergebnis für Merz?", ZDFheute — zdfheute.de
"AfD lotet in Sachsen-Anhalt Optionen aus – und das BSW reagiert", ZDFheute — zdfheute.de
"World reacts to AfD victory in Germany state election", Al Jazeera, 7 September 2026 — aljazeera.com
"Far-Right AfD scores historic victory in German state election", NPR, 6 September 2026 — npr.org
"Germany built a 'firewall' so the far-right could never take power again. It just failed in Saxony-Anhalt", Fortune, 7 September 2026 — fortune.com
Jan Ole Arps, "Die rassistische Volkspartei", analyse & kritik, September 2026 — akweb.de
Rainer Benecke, "Warum Arbeiter*innen die AfD wählen – und was Die Linke daraus lernen kann", links-bewegt, 8 September 2026 — links-bewegt.de
"Nach dem AfD-Wahlsieg: Die Linkspartei biedert sich der CDU an", WSWS, 9 September 2026 — wsws.org
"Landtagswahl in Sachsen-Anhalt 2026", Wikipedia (DE) — de.wikipedia.org
Yücel Özdemir, "Germany at the September turning point: far right on one side, class struggle on the other", Evrensel, 28 August 2026 — evrensel.net

Historical background

Georgi Dimitrov, The United Front Against Fascism (report to the 7th Comintern Congress, 1935)
Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels, Neue Rheinische Zeitung articles (1848–49); Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany
Franz Mehring, History of German Social Democracy
Hans-Ulrich Wehler's "Sonderweg" debate against Daniel Goldhagen; Wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918
Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? (the Herero–Nama genocide and the colony–Nazism continuity)
Marcus Böick, Die Treuhand: Idee – Praxis – Erfahrung 1990–1994
Steffen Mau, Lütten Klein: Leben in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft
Jens Gieseke, Die Stasi 1945–1990
Bertolt Brecht, "Die Lösung" (1953)
Stasi archives (Bundesarchiv, Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv) — stasi-unterlagen-archiv.de
Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, "Rostock-Lichtenhagen 1992" and "Asylkompromiss 1993" dossiers — bpb.de

Earlier pieces on this blog (Knowledge Commons, Oğuz Demirkapı)

"A Class Soldier in Berlin: Elif Eralp", 29 August 2026 — eliferalp
"What Is This Thing Called Racism?", 26 August 2026 — irkcilik
"A TKP Reality: Left-Chauvinism and the Limits of Class Struggle", 14 August 2026 — tkpgercekligi
"The Declaration of Techno-Fascism: The Palantir Manifesto", 11 August 2026 — palantirmanifestosu
"From the Fields of Kırşehir to the Streets of Bağbaşı", 3 August 2026 — yagmurlukirsehir
"A Communist Traveler in Berlin: The Dialectic of Space and the Trail of Truth", 21 July 2026 — berlindebirkomunist
"From the Nuremberg Stage to NATO's Barricades: Capital's Global Fascist Alliance", 5 July 2026 — nurembergnato
"Truth Seeping Through the Smoke: The Class, Sociological, and Political Anatomy of the Sivas Massacre", 1 July 2026 — sivaskatliami
"The Surplus Value on the Thermometer — Not a Climate Catastrophe, but Capital's Massacre!", 28 June 2026 — avrupaninhalleri
"The Ulm 5 Trial — Stammheim's Glass Cubicles and Capital's War Machine", 22 June 2026 — ulm5davasi
"The Masters' Ideological Siege: Exposing the Global 'Whitewashing' Apparatuses", 5 June 2026 — efendilerin-ideolojik-kusatmasi
"From Futurism to Techno-Fascism", 7 September 2026 — futurizmdenteknofasizme
"The Class's Answer to Evrim Ağacı's Question", 7 September 2026 — evrimagacinasinifinyaniti