How Did Germany’s Anti-AfD Firewall Hold?

What the German mainstream calls the ‘firewall’ has held. Despite winning an impressive 43.8% of the vote in regional elections in Saxony-Anhalt, the opposition AfD, or Alternative for Germany party, has fallen three seats short of the absolute majority in the regional parliament that would have ensured that the party could form a government under prime minister candidate Ulrich Siegmund.

But critical German observers are pointing to a massive anomaly in the voting data that raises the obvious question: how exactly did the ‘firewall’ hold?

Here is a graph published by the X-account Datenfuzzi comparing the results of in-person voting to the results of voting by mail-in ballot.

The first, darker line represents the in-person voting results; the second, lighter line represents the results of voting by mail-in ballot. As you can see, the AfD received over 50% of the votes cast in person (51.2%), but less than half that percentage of the votes cast by mail-in ballot. All the main establishment parties, by contrast, performed significantly better in the mail-in ballots than in the in-person vote. So too did the post-Communist ‘Left’ party (Die Linke).

Here is a visual illustrating the point that can be seen on several German X feeds.

The AfD’s share of the mail-in vote is 27 percentage points less than its share of the in-person vote, whereas all the other parties had a larger share of the mail-in vote compared to the in-person vote: the Christian Democrats of Chancellor Friedrich Merz +9.7 percentage points, Merz’s Social Democratic coalition partners +5.9 percentage points, and so on.

Numerous German-speaking commentators are wondering: how is this possible? Is it a reflection of some party or demographic preference for in-person voting? Or is it rather a reflection of the greater susceptibility to manipulation of mail-in ballots?

As the lawyer Dirk Schmitz notes in an interview with the German alternative media Tichy’s Einblick, the lesser security of mail-in voting has been recognised on several occasions by Germany’s own Constitutional Court. Schmitz argues that mail-in voting should be a limited exception to in-person voting rather than a widely-used alternative.

In the Saxony-Anhalt elections, however, mail-in ballots represented 27% of all votes cast, making it clear that it was precisely the mail-in ballots that deprived the AfD of its absolute majority.

Now, the AfD will have to depend on the support of another post-Communist party – the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) – to be able to elect Siegmund as prime minister and form a government. The BSW is a break-away faction of the ‘Left’ party. The BSW barely managed to achieve the threshold of 5% of the vote required for obtaining seats in the parliament, but it will now play the role of ‘kingmaker’.

Despite certain ‘overlaps’ with the AfD on policy matters, BSW officials have, however, made clear that they do not want their representatives to vote for Siegmund. (See here, for instance.) Instead, the BSW has proposed the election of a “non-partisan” prime minister supported by “changing majorities”. There are signs of the establishment parties now rallying to this so-called ‘BSW model’ in order to keep the AfD out of power.

John Rosenthal is a journalist and political analyst who writes on European politics and transatlantic issues. You can subscribe to his Transatlantic Intelligencer Substack (where this article first appeared) here.