The Alternative for Germany took roughly 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, more than double the Christian Democrats, on a turnout well above what state elections usually draw. It won 39 of 83 seats and finished three short of an absolute majority. In the same state five years ago it took 20.8 percent. It has doubled.
The reflex, in Jewish coverage of German politics, is to reach immediately for 1933. I want to argue that the comparison is doing less work than people think, and that the two questions actually raised by Sunday are more uncomfortable than the one everybody is asking.
Start with what the AfD is not. It has no paramilitary wing. There is no equivalent of the SA, no organized street army, no attempted putsch in its history. Its program is nativist and anti-EU rather than exterminationist, built around deportations, hostility to Islam, leaving the euro and restoring ties with Moscow. And unlike Weimar, the Federal Republic was designed from the ground up to stop exactly this. It has a domestic intelligence service that monitors parties, a constitutional court that can ban them, and an informal firewall among the mainstream parties against ever governing with the AfD. That is why a party with 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt may still not form a government there.
None of which is reassurance, because the useful question is not whether the AfD is the NSDAP. Almost no serious German historian argues that it is. The useful question is whether an architecture built to stop a party that would seize power by force can stop one that keeps winning elections.
That architecture was designed for a coup, and what it is facing is a plurality. Germany's domestic intelligence service has classified the AfD as right wing extremist nationally and in several states. A German court found it permissible to call Björn Höcke a fascist. Höcke has been fined for using a banned SA slogan and once described the Berlin Holocaust memorial in terms that caused a national scandal. Alexander Gauland dismissed twelve years of Nazi rule as a speck in a thousand years of German history. All of this is on the record, all of it was known before Sunday, and 44 percent of Saxony-Anhalt voted for the party anyway.
You can read that two ways. Either the firewall is holding, since the party still cannot govern. Or the firewall is now the thing producing the vote, since every year the AfD is excluded from power is another year it can tell voters that the establishment has rigged the game against them. Alice Weidel spent Sunday night predicting the chancellor's removal and federal elections before Christmas. Ulrich Siegmund, the 35-year-old who led the campaign, told supporters the result was a signal for all of Germany. They are not behaving like people who feel contained.
Which brings me to the part that should concern Jewish readers most, and that has almost nothing to do with 1933.
The AfD presents itself as a friend of Israel. It has a Jewish members' group. It votes against antisemitism resolutions it deems too soft and points at Muslim immigration as the true engine of Jew hatred in Germany, which is an argument with real evidence behind it and which the party did not invent. And every significant Jewish organization in Germany, starting with the Central Council of Jews, wants nothing to do with it.
That is not squeamishness or a failure to update. It is a judgment made by the people with the most direct exposure to the consequences, and it deserves more weight in Israeli and Jewish coverage than it usually gets. German Jews have concluded that a party can be sincerely pro-Israel in its foreign policy and still be dangerous to the Jews who actually live in Germany, because the thing that makes it dangerous is not its position on Jerusalem. It is an ethnic conception of who belongs in the country. A politics organized around the idea that Germany belongs to Germans by descent does not become safe for a minority because it has decided that this particular minority has a state elsewhere. If anything, that is the oldest version of the offer.
This is the test case, and it is going to keep recurring, because the AfD is not the only European party making it. Israel now has a standing choice to make about parties that support it loudly abroad while unsettling the Jewish communities living under them. Jerusalem has generally taken the support. The communities have generally objected. Sunday moved that argument from theoretical to operational, because a party in that category is now within three seats of running a German state.
I do not think Germany is what it was in 1933. The country's institutions are stronger, its memory culture is real, and its intelligence services are doing the job Weimar's did not exist to do. But the institutions were built on an assumption that has quietly stopped holding, which is that a party like this would always be a minority the mainstream could isolate. In Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday it was not a minority. It was the largest thing in the state by a factor of two.
What happens next in Magdeburg is a question about coalition arithmetic. What happens after that is a question about whether a democracy can indefinitely refuse to seat the party that keeps winning, and what it becomes if it tries.
