Far Right Wins Again: Berlin's Warning Goes Unheard
Exit polls from the regional election confirm another win for the far right in a state that, not long ago, would have seemed unthinkable territory.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland has done it again. Exit polls from the regional election confirm another win for the far right in a state that, not long ago, would have seemed unthinkable territory. This is not a protest vote anymore. It is a pattern — and the rest of Europe, Malta included, should be paying closer attention than it is.
The AfD's advance did not happen in a vacuum. The same weekend, Dutch riot police were deployed in The Hague after hundreds of far-right demonstrators turned violent, chanting what Prime Minister Rob Jetten described as "abhorrent" antisemitic slogans. Two countries, two incidents, one accelerating current. What is striking is not the violence itself but the speed with which it is becoming ordinary — something to be dispersed, reported, and folded into the week's news without the political reckoning it demands.
Ask who benefits. The answer is the same parties who have spent a decade insisting they are merely asking questions — about migration, about national identity, about who belongs — while the questions grew louder and the answers grew uglier. They benefit from the slow normalisation of language that, a generation ago, would have ended careers. Now it wins regions.
Ask who pays. The Polish grandmother in The Hague who watched the march from her window. The German teenager of Turkish descent whose classmates repeat things they heard at home. The Maltese migrant worker in Frankfurt who checks the news and quietly recalculates his options. These are not abstractions. They are people whose daily calculus is being rewritten by votes cast in places that do not consider them when the booth closes.
What makes this moment structurally different from previous far-right surges is the convergence. In the United States, Tucker Carlson is now defending a progressive Muslim Democrat — Abdul El-Sayed — not out of principle but because it destabilises the centre. In Maine, Democrats are scrambling to unseat Susan Collins with a candidate who arrived unexpectedly. The political ground is moving everywhere at once, and the traditional markers — left, right, coalition, opposition — are becoming unreliable instruments.
In Germany, the AfD has understood something that centrist parties keep refusing to learn: people do not vote for what they believe will win. They vote for what they believe will be heard. Every regional result that goes unaddressed with structural policy — on housing, on wages, on the lived experience of economic anxiety — is a recruitment poster for the movement that follows.
One detail stays with me: in Thuringia, the AfD performed best in constituencies where public transport links were cut in the austerity rounds of the previous decade. The grievance is always real. The party that harvests it never intends to fix it.
That is the part nobody in the winning coalition will say out loud.
