A political dam is bursting in Germany

On May 8, 1654, the mayor of Magdeburg appeared before the Imperial Diet in Regensburg with two hollow copper hemispheres and 30 horses. Nothing connected the metal hemispheres, but the horses could not separate them. The hemispheres were held together by the vacuum inside them and the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. Only when a valve was opened and air was forced inside could the spheres be separated.

Another vacuum in Magdeburg will be filled tomorrow, September 6, when the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, of which Magdeburg is the capital, holds elections. The election result is expected to shake up German politics and provide an important lesson for democratic movements outside Germany: rallying against the far right can be dangerous if it becomes a substitute for serious political strategy.

According to the latest opinion polls, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has the support of as many as 43% of voters, far ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has 23%. This gives the AfD a realistic chance to lead the government of a federal state for the first time in Germany’s post-war history. The elections in Saxony-Anhalt could be a turning point that will mark the end of the “political dam” that the main German political parties have erected to prevent the far-right from coming to power.

In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is led by Ulrich Sigmund, a charismatic 35-year-old entrepreneur who has the most followers on social media of any regional politician. The state’s security services consider his party extremist. Ironically, constitutional provisions designed to prevent such parties from coming to power could play a crucial role in their rise.

In Germany, a 5% electoral threshold for entering the federal and state parliaments was introduced when the Federal Republic was founded, in order to prevent political fragmentation and was one of the key lessons of the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Today, however, this threshold could leave the Social Democrats, the Greens, the Liberals and the left-nationalist BSW without seats in the Saxony-Anhalt parliament - all of whom are on the verge of the required number of votes. If a larger number of them do not pass the electoral threshold, the AfD could turn its approximately 40% of the vote into an absolute majority.

But even if smaller parties do enter parliament, the arrival of an AfD-led government in Saxony-Anhalt can only be prevented by a minority government or an ideologically diverse coalition bringing together the CDU and the anti-capitalist Left party. Such a constellation would only confirm the far-right's claims that a cartel of traditional political forces has formed an alliance to prevent it from coming to power, and there is no doubt that the result would be a government whose only common denominator would be hostility towards the AfD.

The AfD's rise is explained by a combination of widespread fears about immigration and related security issues, as well as rising energy prices and dissatisfaction with so-called progressive cultural ideas, from gender issues to language. In Saxony-Anhalt, the party is unabashed in its election manifesto. It warns of the "aging and extinction of the German people" and advocates banning rainbow flags on school buildings, introducing a moratorium on the expansion of wind energy, and forming voluntary citizen patrols. Sigmund often speaks of "re-emigration," and has made the abolition of public service broadcasting one of its key election slogans. It claims that compulsory education is a problem, while it sees Vladimir Putin's Russia as a potential partner.

Saxony-Anhalt may be just the beginning. With 28% of the vote, the AfD is currently the strongest party in opinion polls nationwide. Its membership is growing rapidly, and almost half of Germans say they are not afraid of it. Just two weeks after the Saxony-Anhalt elections, the AfD is expected to win first place in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and perform well in Berlin.

The main German parties, however, are not happy with the solution of leaving a third of the electorate without their representatives in parliament. But it cannot be fear-mongering either. The cover of Der Spiegel, Germany's most influential weekly, recently featured a photo of Sigmund stylized as a police photo of a criminal with the headline "Germany's Most Dangerous Man." Sigmund was clearly delighted, and he handed out copies of the magazine with his signature, turning the cover into election propaganda material.

Almost 400 years ago, the Magdeburg hemisphere experiment demonstrated the extraordinary power that a vacuum can create. A political dam works on the same principle: it holds back opposition forces and prevents them from coming to power. But it is no substitute for effective government: the resulting vacuum is quickly filled when the valves are opened.

The same is true for other European countries. In France, the main parties joined forces to contain the far right in the 2024 parliamentary elections, but they failed to form a stable government. In Belgium, a “political cordon sanitaire” did not prevent the rise of the nationalist party Flemish Interest. And in the Netherlands and Sweden, years of ignoring the far right did not prevent its electorate from expanding.

Liberal democracy today does not need to build ever higher walls against political rebels, but to provide a state that fulfills its basic promises: an immigration policy that is neither demonstrably cruel nor naively based on illusions; an energy policy that helps industrial production, not weakens it; reforms that stimulate economic growth, rather than hindering it with regulation.

In 1654, two copper hemispheres and 30 horses demonstrated the power of atmospheric pressure to the assembled princes of the Holy Roman Empire. In September 2026, Magdeburg could once again demonstrate the power of atmospheric pressure. The question is no longer whether the vacuum will be filled, but whether it will be filled by anger and resentment or by expertise, prudence and integrity.

The author is a member of the Commission for Fundamental Values ​​of the Social Democratic Party of Germany; his latest book is Die Hetzer sind immer die Anderen (“The Instigators Are Always the Others”)

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026.