Three Seats Short: The AfD's Perfect Night in Saxony-Anhalt

Introduction

Recorded the day after the Saxony-Anhalt state election, this Duran episode works one result into a verdict on the whole German system: the AfD outpolled even the most optimistic surveys with almost 44% on record turnout, in the very conservative heartland where Helmut Kohl's reunification CDU once ruled — and still finished three seats short of a majority. Alexander Mercouris calls that "almost the optimal result": govern and the firewall has collapsed; be kept out and the party becomes the ripped-off underdog. Around that paradox the episode builds the rest — why getting rid of Merz buys the CDU nothing, why the hosts read the party's future through Britain's Starmer-to-Burnham swap, and the closing question they leave open: is Alice Weidel an Orbán or a Meloni?

A Tidal Wave, Whatever the State's Size

Alex Christoforou opened with the result on the table: "let's talk about the election results in Germany in Saxony-Anhalt with the big winner being the AfD." Mercouris's answer set the episode's register: "Absolutely a huge victory for the AfD." They "outpaced even the most optimistic estimates from opinion polls" — most capped the party at 43%; "they got 40, almost 44%" — and they did it on a record turnout: over 77% of the state's voters turned out. In regional terms, "it's a tidal wave." The OSW Centre for Eastern Studies puts the final figure at 43.8% (+23 points on 2021) on 77.8% turnout — the highest recorded in the state since 1989 (corroborating the beyond-the-polls claim).

And the qualifier he insisted on: Saxony-Anhalt is "in no sense a German economic powerhouse" — around two million people, no enormous industries — which is exactly what makes the mirror half of the result a national story: "a total collapse of Chancellor Merz's CDU." The party has gone from about 36% in 2021 to just over 17% — "their vote has more than halved" — and it happened where the CDU was always strongest: the conservative south of the former East Germany, "the party of reunification, the party of Helmut Kohl." OSW's count: 17.2%, down 19.9 points, on 2021's actual 37.1% — the crash slightly deeper than stated on air (corroborating the collapse). Which is why, for Mercouris, this is "a massive repudiation of the entire German political system" — not a local anomaly.

The Firewall Meets Its Destruction Test

The structural claim: this is the moment "the so-called firewall in Germany" — "the principle that you never enter into coalition with the AfD" — "is going to be tested to destruction," because the AfD has been delivered "what for them is the perfect result": just short of a governing majority.

Why short? Because the smaller parties all cleared the threshold — Die Linke, in East Germany "the legacy party of the former East German Communist Party", the Greens, and "the BSW, Sahra Wagenknecht's party — they all did well enough to get into the local parliament." The arithmetic lands with precision: "they're three seats short of a majority" — 39 of 83 seats against the 42 needed, exactly as the compiled record confirms (Wikipedia's seat table) — while carrying "more than twice as many votes as the next biggest party."

So apply the firewall, Mercouris asks, and what do you get? "A broken, discredited, and deeply unpopular CDU forming a government" with parties identified with the former ruling communists — "a grotesque stitch up by the establishment" to keep the strongest party out of power, "an inversion of democracy." Hence the paradox he keeps returning to: "this is almost the optimal result" for a party that "has never been tested in government" anywhere in Germany. Christoforou's version is flatter: if they govern, "the firewall is over"; if they're kept out, "it looks like they've gotten ripped off" and "the corrupt establishment elite are ignoring the will of the people." Mercouris, deadpan: "Which is true, by the way."

The Chess Board — and Merz's Weeks

The near-term board: the BSW "has indicated that it might tolerate an AfD government" — an uncomfortable partner the AfD is unlikely to cut deals with. And "what is not impossible is that there might be a drift of support from the local regional CDU" — parliamentary-group members moving across — though anyone who did would be "slated within the CDU", which "would never forgive them." The countervailing pressure: "if we don't do this, then we're going to be toast" at the next election. (The compiled record sharpens this corner: MDR surveyed all 15 CDU Landtag members and every one ruled out defecting — the deterrent is visibly operating (a qualification, not a contradiction).)

Then Berlin. Across Germany the AfD has been "gaining steadily in support", and there is growing "hostility to Merz specifically" — including "a faction starting to form" inside the CDU itself, from the program the hosts recorded in Chattanooga, saying Merz is part of the problem and must go. The polling marker: "something like a fifth of Germans no longer expect Merz to be chancellor beyond the end of the year." In Germany that is unusual — chancellors are not normally pushed out mid-term — and yet "contempt and dislike of Merz is so great," inside his own party too, that Mercouris sees "a very high chance that we could be seeing the end of Merz within the next few weeks." Christoforou's coda pulls no punches: "He is arrogant, aloof and out of touch and delusional... and no one likes him. So the CDU needs to get rid of him." "Exactly," Mercouris says.

What a CDU Reset Can and Cannot Buy

The second segment takes the obvious move apart. Dump Merz "ASAP" — but whoever takes over "is going to have a lot of work to do", presiding over major shifts in economic and foreign policy that won't happen — while "the absolute guarantee" is that Merz himself sticks to the current course. The arithmetic has already flipped: the last Bundestag election's CDU 28% against AfD 20% has become CDU down to 21%, with the AfD "now polling at 28%" and, in Mercouris's judgment, likely to go above 30. "So there isn't a huge amount of time."

Christoforou probes the maximum a reset could offer — "we'll deal with immigration and we'll stop sending money to Ukraine", while still hating Russia, still pouring "money into NATO" and the arms companies — "or is this just game over for the CDU?" Mercouris: "It doesn't address the core problem." Shoveling money to Zelensky worsens Germany's finances; on immigration the CDU "will now never win against the AfD"; and for most Germans the party "is now the party that embraced mass, massive immigration" — "people are never going to forget how Angela Merkel in 2015 basically invited people from Syria and the Middle East." "She started the whole thing," Christoforou interjects. "She did it on purpose." You cannot rewind time, blame it all on Merkel, and call that a new leaf; and the party "is not going to weaken the link to Brussels and to the EU" — so no cheap Russian energy, the arms buildup and the debt continue. The sum: "Merz's policies slightly diluted, but without Merz."

The Starmer-to-Burnham Playbook

So the prediction, delivered as a playbook already performed once: the next CDU leader will be "a bit more personable, a bit more amiable", the party will enjoy "a bump up in support for a few months" — and then it will become clear the successor is incapable of turning things round, support will fall faster than before, because the CDU "doesn't have any real answers to the problems of Germany."

And if the script looks British, "it is because it is exactly the same": Labour "got rid of Starmer" — who has left Parliament and is pursuing the NATO Secretary General job — and in came Andy Burnham. Remove the arrogant, aloof, complacent figure; bring in better political skills; "you change nothing" — and the public, after briefly finding "an attractive new man," starts "drifting back, in Germany's case to the AfD, in Britain's case to Reform." Same play, same ending.

Ban It, Smear It — and Watch It Grow

The radical alternatives fare no better. The SPD is "in an existential crisis", dying in its old heartlands, and its policy increasingly reduces to one thing: "to ban the AfD." The trouble is that "with every AfD win... banning the AfD becomes increasingly difficult" — and the ban drum is genuinely beating (two governing ministers urged ban proceedings before the Constitutional Court in August, on the basis of the domestic intelligence service's extremist classification of the state party — corroborating the ban-lobby reading, with the caveat that an op-ed is not a platform).

The smear route has already backfired. "My own view is that the timing of the Leipzig drone incident was partly intended to damage the AfD in this election" — that is Mercouris's explicitly-owned speculation — and the accompanying line, that Germany "can't share intelligence with the AfD because they are controlled by Moscow," had "the opposite effect to what people in Berlin might have hoped for": "it's actually increased support for the AfD."

Which leaves the establishment with the scenario Mercouris finds most likely: "limping along, coming up with no solutions", "rotating leaders — getting rid of Merz, bringing someone else in — but changing nothing of substance", fingers crossed for "a political crisis in Moscow" or some other deliverance. Christoforou names it: the UK method, "so they'll just have rotating chancellors" — which, he notes, "is not working out for Labour" either. As for the propaganda cupboard: "All they've got is Russia, Russia, Russia."

Orbán or Meloni?

The episode closes on the question Christoforou keeps coming back to: is "Weidel an Orban or a Meloni?" — will she "stand firm on her policies even if the globalists in Europe put a lot of pressure on her", or "fold like Meloni folded" into a law-abiding globalist? "This is an excellent question," Mercouris says — and immediately grants the caveat their German viewers write in with, that "you're putting too much into this AfD": the party "isn't as radical as it appears" — its program barely differs from the CDU's, it is a neoliberal party supporting much of the neoliberal consensus, and anyway "they're politicians at the end of the day": "they're meant to lie, they're meant to deceive."

But two things do distinguish it. On immigration the party takes "a much more radical stance... than any of the other parties." And it takes "a different line on Russia": end the conflict, "get Russian gas moving west to Germany again", undertake "some kind of rapprochement" — a costly position held for years that is now "starting to pay electoral dividends" as more Germans understand "what a disastrous thing cutting off all that gas... was." The payoff argument, from Mercouris's own recent time in Germany: Merz's war policies are so unpopular that an AfD government reversing them would be "cutting with the political grain" — popular, electorally successful — something a German government "could probably, alone in Europe, pull off." And the final marker: Weidel's AfD "is now talking about quitting the euro" — whether they would is another question, but at least they are talking about it. "And who else in Germany is?"