Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has won by a landslide in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, according to exit polls, a result that could see the party lead a German state government for the first time since the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945.

The outcome, if confirmed and translated into a governing coalition, would represent one of the most consequential shifts in German politics since reunification. No party positioned to the right of the Christian Democrats has controlled a state government in Germany since the end of World War II, a legacy of the country's determined postwar effort to insulate its democracy from the forces that destroyed the Weimar Republic and enabled Adolf Hitler's dictatorship.

Whether the AfD can actually translate its electoral strength into power remains uncertain. Germany's mainstream parties have so far maintained a strict "firewall," refusing to enter coalitions with the AfD at any level of government. But a landslide of this scale in Saxony-Anhalt will test the durability of that consensus and force rival parties into difficult arithmetic over how to build a governing majority without the AfD's participation.

Echoes of a Fragile Republic

Historians who study the fall of German democracy in the 1930s have long warned that its collapse was not inevitable, but rather the product of miscalculation by establishment politicians who believed they could control extremist forces by bringing them inside the tent rather than keeping them out.

In January 1933, a small clique of conservative and nationalist politicians, led by Franz von Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher, persuaded President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor, even though the Nazi party had just lost seats and roughly two million votes in the November 1932 election. Papen calculated that Hitler could be tamed inside a coalition government, reportedly boasting to a friend that "in two months we'll have pushed Hitler into a corner so hard that he'll be squeaking." He was catastrophically wrong.

"There was no inevitability about Hitler's accession to power. Political miscalculation by those with regular access to the corridors of power rather than any action on the part of the Nazi leader played a larger role in placing him in the Chancellor's seat," historian Ian Kershaw has written.

As historians Norman Lowe and John Traynor note, the conservative establishment of the day did not believe in genuine democracy and hoped that cooperation with the Nazis would help them beat back the Communist Party, which had also surged at the ballot box. The result was that Germany's mainstream right, fearful of the far left, opened the door to the far right instead of uniting against both.

That history casts a long shadow over today's debate about the "firewall" strategy. Germany's postwar constitutional order, the Basic Law, was explicitly designed with militant democracy in mind, giving the state tools to defend itself against extremist movements that might exploit democratic processes to seize power, much as the Nazis did. But maintaining a firewall against a party that wins a plurality or majority of votes raises its own democratic tensions: mainstream parties risk being accused of thwarting the will of voters, potentially fueling the very grievance politics that fuels the AfD's rise.

What a State Win Would Signal

Saxony-Anhalt, a state in the former East Germany, has become one of the AfD's strongholds, reflecting a broader pattern of far-right support concentrated in the formerly Communist east, where economic anxieties, demographic decline, and disillusionment with Berlin's political establishment have run deep since reunification.

A decisive AfD win there would embolden the party's leadership nationally and provide a template, however contested, for governance ahead of Germany's next federal elections. Other mainstream parties would face pressure to explain how they intend to form a government without the AfD if the numbers no longer allow for a majority among the parties committed to the firewall.

Analysts and historians of the Weimar collapse have repeatedly cautioned against drawing simple equivalences between the 1930s and today. Germany's institutions, its constitutional court, and its civil society are far stronger now than they were in the dying days of the Weimar Republic. But the underlying lesson many historians draw—that democratic collapse is rarely inevitable and often results from the choices of establishment actors who believe they can manage extremism rather than confront it—has taken on renewed urgency as the AfD's electoral strength grows.

What happens next in Saxony-Anhalt, whether mainstream parties can cobble together a coalition to keep the AfD from governing or whether the firewall finally cracks, will be watched closely across Germany and Europe as a bellwether for the country's political future.