Germany Already Ran This Experiment

Saxony-Anhalt handed 49 percent of its vote to two parties that want the sanctions on Russia lifted, and the reflex is to read that as German policy loosening. Germany already ran this experiment. In 2024 the same test was set three times across the eastern states, one of those parties took seats in two state governments and it wrote its language into a coalition preamble. Berlin's federal line did not move.

Berlin had a busy week. A drone carrying explosives closed runways at Leipzig/Halle Airport in August, and on 1 September the foreign minister named Russia as the perpetrator and attached costs: the Bonn consulate shuts by 18 September, the Berlin cultural centre is closed, border controls on Russian nationals tighten, pressure on the shadow fleet increases. Five days later the interior ministry's counter-sabotage plan surfaced in the press. A sensor network against intrusion, rapid drone-defence units in three cities, wider use of facial recognition and new rights for companies to bring down drones over their own sites.

On the same Sunday, Saxony-Anhalt voted. The official count across all 2,661 districts gives the AfD 43.8 percent, up 23 points, against a Christian Democrat collapse from 37.1 to 17.2. Add the 5.3 percent taken by the Wagenknecht alliance and just over 49 percent of the state went to parties opposed to sanctions and to arming Ukraine. Turnout reached 77.8 percent, up more than seventeen points, which rules out the comfortable explanation that this was apathy on one side rather than mobilisation on the other.

The obvious reading writes itself, and it is the reading that has already been tested and failed.

Two years ago Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg voted within three weeks of each other. The AfD came first in Thuringia with 32.8 percent, the first far-right first-place finish in Germany since 1945, from a branch its own state intelligence service had classified as extremist. The Wagenknecht alliance did better than that in one respect. It did not merely poll well. It governed. Brandenburg gave it a coalition with the Social Democrats on a two-seat majority, Thuringia produced a three-way arrangement sworn in that December and its coalition text carried an explicit call for a diplomatic initiative to end the war, with the parties recording openly that they disagreed about weapons deliveries.

That is as close to a controlled trial as European politics offers. A party built on ending sanctions reached actual state power, in two states, with its position written into a governing document.

German federal policy went the other way. Berlin stayed Ukraine's largest European donor, the sanctions rolled over and the 2025 federal election produced a chancellor more hawkish than the one before. Whatever channel is supposed to carry an eastern state result into federal Russia policy, it has been tested three times and has not carried anything yet.

None of which makes 43.8 percent uninteresting. It makes the interesting question a different one. The state chamber holds no power over sanctions, NATO commitments or arms transfers, so the transmission argument has to run through mood, and mood has now lost three times. What a state government does control is its interior ministry, and through it the state office that classifies political extremism. In Saxony-Anhalt that office has classified the local AfD as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation. A counter-sabotage architecture assembled in Berlin runs partly through sixteen such offices. That is an institutional question about who holds files, and it is a sharper one than anything about sanctions.

The AfD finished three seats short and every other party says it will not govern with them. So the experiment runs a fourth time.