Carys Garland is pleased to welcome Markus Ziener, Visiting Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He interprets the AfD’s breakthrough in Saxony-Anhalt as a potentially historic turning point in post-war German politics. For Ziener, the significance lies not only in the scale of the far right’s electoral success, but also in the constituency behind it: many AfD voters, he argues, were previously politically disengaged rather than simply defecting from established parties. This complicates conventional explanations of the result as a straightforward transfer of support from the CDU to the AfD and raises a deeper question about the political expectations of a newly mobilised electorate.
