German Voters Humiliate Establishment — Regime Responds With More Of The Same

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Right Patriots
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Germany’s political elite just took a historic electoral beating — and their response proves exactly why voters are abandoning them in droves.

The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party captured 43.8% of the statewide second vote in Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt election, crushing Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative-leaning Christian Democratic Union, which managed just 17.2%, according to the state of Saxony-Anhalt.

Merz’s reaction? He declared Germany’s political class was “deeply shocked” and suggested he needed to better connect with voters emotionally, Politico reported.

That’s right — after years of mass migration chaos, skyrocketing energy costs, and weaponizing domestic intelligence agencies to spy on the AfD, the establishment’s big takeaway is they need more “empathy.”

“AfD’s success in Sunday’s local elections is a clear indication of frustration amongst some German voters in the leadership of Merz and CDU and SPD. Migration is clearly the issue which has raised the temperature in the pot, however, anemic growth, high energy prices, largescale layoffs, in a word economic uncertainty is what caused the water to run over in this instance.”

That’s Daniel Kochis, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Only 9% of Saxony-Anhalt voters viewed Merz’s political performance positively, according to an election-day survey conducted by Infratest dimap for ARD. Merz responded by emphasizing “compassion, empathy, and emotions” as his government searched for answers.

The disconnect is staggering. Voters handed the establishment a crushing defeat over substantive policy failures — border chaos, economic decline, energy disaster — and the response is therapeutic language about feelings.

The Migration Crisis The Elite Won’t Admit

Germany initially registered roughly 1.09 million asylum-seeker arrivals through its EASY distribution system during the 2015 migration crisis, while asylum applications more than doubled from the previous year, according to Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.

The migration surge coincided with a sharp increase in the share of violent-crime suspects who were not German citizens. Non-Germans accounted for 28.8% of violent-crime suspects in 2014, rising to 33.2% in 2015 and 38.1% in 2016, according to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office.

Vice President JD Vance confronted European leaders during a Feb. 14, 2025, address to the Munich Security Conference in Germany, telling the gathering of political and national security officials that there was “nothing more urgent than mass migration” and arguing that Europe’s migration problems stemmed from deliberate policy choices made over the previous decade.

Vance also directly attacked the practice of politically isolating parties such as the AfD, warning German leaders against disregarding millions of voters whose views they opposed. “There is no room for firewalls,” Vance said, according to the American Presidency Project.

The Firewall The Voters Just Rejected

Germany’s major parties have continued refusing to cooperate with the AfD, leaving the party short of control in Saxony-Anhalt despite winning 39 of the legislature’s 83 seats, according to Reuters. AfD leaders are now attempting to attract conservative lawmakers while Merz has maintained the firewall.

The AfD has simultaneously faced years of scrutiny from Germany’s domestic intelligence apparatus. A German appeals court ruled in 2024 that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution could continue treating the AfD as a suspected extremist organization and subjecting it to surveillance, including wiretapping, Reuters reported.

Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution escalated its assessment in May 2025 by classifying the entire AfD as an “extremist” organization, opening the door to expanded surveillance of the party. A Cologne court temporarily blocked the agency from applying that designation to the entire party in February 2026, finding insufficient evidence to generalize extremist conduct across the whole organization.

Translation: voters who reject the establishment’s migration and energy policies are “extremists” who must be stopped — with surveillance if necessary.

Economic Collapse The Elite Created

Germany shut its final three commercial nuclear reactors in April 2023, completing a yearslong nuclear phaseout shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended Germany’s longstanding reliance on cheap Russian energy, according to Germany’s Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management.

German industrial production has declined every year since 2022, with high energy, labor and regulatory costs eroding the country’s competitiveness, Reuters reported in April, citing the Federation of German Industries. The industry group warned that German manufacturing could contract for a fifth consecutive year in 2026.

German gas storage stood at just 53% on Sept. 1 — its lowest level in 15 years — while European gas prices climbed to their highest point since January 2023 amid renewed geopolitical turmoil, according to Reuters.

Volkswagen is pursuing a sweeping restructuring that could ultimately eliminate as many as 100,000 jobs as the automaker struggles with Chinese rivals, high costs and its expensive transition toward electric vehicles, the Wall Street Journal reported in September.

Voters delivered a verdict on all of this Sunday. The establishment’s answer? More of the same — plus empathy.

“I’m not sure how much AfD’s weekend success is a voter reaction to the firewall of the centrist parties in Germany vis a vis AfD but rather more a message from voters that on some key issues, they don’t see progress moving quickly enough and are willing to move in different directions with their votes to seek change,” Kochis told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Merz has acknowledged that his own leadership contributed to the collapse but has given no indication that Germany’s establishment parties will abandon the firewall separating them from the AfD, according to Politico.

The voters spoke. The elite aren’t listening.

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