BERLIN — It’s not the kind of photo op German Chancellor Friedrich Merz would likely want to frame for his office wall: him standing next to Ulrich Siegmund, the far-right politician a national magazine recently labeled the country’s “most dangerous man.”
And yet, such a picture might soon be hard for Merz to avoid. On Sept. 6, Siegmund is set for a sweeping victory in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. If his far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party secures an outright majority in the state parliament, Siegmund will likely become premier, and his party will have broken through the political “firewall” that has kept it out of all federal and state governments since its founding in 2013.
It would be a historic triumph for the AfD and a shock to Germany’s political system.
As premier, one of Siegmund’s earliest duties would be to take over the annually rotating chair position of the regular conferences of Germany’s 16 state premiers. The role usually comes with a visit to Berlin and a joint appearance with the chancellor before the press.
Calling this uncharted territory would be an understatement. “The AfD is questioning the fundamental decisions made by the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949,” Merz once said.
The chancellor is not alone in his concern. All other major parties, and large parts of the German media, see the AfD as a threat to the country’s liberal postwar order. Yet, if the party takes power in a state for the first time, the political establishment will no longer be able to keep it at arm’s length. While normal relations may be out of the question, at least for the foreseeable future, Germany’s federal system requires a minimum of cooperation and mutual support.
So how would the German establishment deal with a state governed by the AfD?
POLITICO put this question to officials in the federal government and several state governments. The reluctance to answer was striking, especially among Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union. Senior party figures and state ministers either refused to comment or would not be quoted by name.
The hesitation is understandable. The CDU and the CSU once owned the political space to the right of center. Today, the AfD is eating into it. State ministers from both the Social Democrats and the Greens were more prepared to discuss strategy on the record.
The conversations for this article were dominated by a single concern: domestic security, especially the protection of intelligence information, given the AfD’s advocacy for closer ties with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
According to Social Democrat Georg Maier, who serves as the state of Thuringia’s interior minister, Siegmund’s party has “good channels” to Moscow. “If the AfD provides the minister-president in Saxony-Anhalt, the champagne corks will be popping in the Kremlin,” he told POLITICO.
AfD supporters listen to Siegmund during a campaign event in Dessau-Roßlau, Germany, on Aug. 19, 2026. | Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesAlthough there is no playbook yet for containing an AfD government, the thinking in Berlin and several state capitals has already moved well beyond the abstract.
Option 1: Hold extra informal meetings
One way to limit the AfD’s access to sensitive discussions could be to simply have more discussions. In addition to the gathering of state premiers that Siegmund would be expected to chair for a year, Germany’s states regularly coordinate through a network of ministerial “conferences.” Among the most important is the conference of interior ministers, where some of the country’s most pressing security and intelligence matters are discussed.
One possibility being considered is to keep holding the regular meetings of the interior ministers but also organize separate gatherings for particularly sensitive issues. Only Germany’s 15 other interior ministers would attend these meetings, without the representative from Saxony-Anhalt. Several ministers confirmed this hypothetical scenario to POLITICO.
The idea builds on a long-established practice in German politics. State governments are informally grouped into so-called “A” and “B” states, depending on which political camp holds the governing majority: Social Democratic-led governments on one side, conservative governments on the other. Before major conferences, both camps coordinate internally.
Applied to the AfD, this model would put the ostracized government on one side and everyone else on the other.
Christoph Degenhart, a professor emeritus of constitutional law and former judge at Saxony’s Constitutional Court, said the idea is definitely conceivable. “How long that would work and whether the courts would tolerate it is, of course, another question.”
Option 2: Erect a wall
One of the biggest worries regarding the AfD is its closeness to Moscow, according to Maier.
Specifically, the minister’s biggest concern is an AfD-led interior ministry. Whoever runs such a department, he said, gains access to highly classified information. And yet, excluding the entire state from Germany’s domestic intelligence network would not be possible; public safety, including protection against terrorist attacks, would rule that out.
“But we can build Chinese walls into our joint information systems, barriers that block certain information,” said the minister. He laughed briefly. “‘Chinese walls’ fits perfectly here. The AfD doesn’t just have a soft spot for Moscow,” he added.
What information would Maier wall off? “We would have to keep all intelligence relating to right-wing extremism and the entire area of espionage away from the AfD,” he said. Such a “preventive segmentation” would be legally possible, he added, citing legal advice he has obtained. It could also be implemented relatively quickly. “Government formation is not going to happen overnight,” he said.
Patrick Harr, a spokesperson for the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch, rejected all accusations of closeness to Russia. “That’s complete nonsense,” he said. “We don’t have a red telephone to Moscow.”
“We talk to everyone, whether West or East,” he added. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to hand over files. Anyone who claims otherwise is talking nonsense. If and when we get access to such information, we understand our responsibility as a party of government.”
But Konstantin von Notz, a Green member of the Bundestag and deputy chair of its intelligence oversight panel, pointed to Austria’s far-right Freedom Party’s (FPÖ) time in government as a cautionary example. After entering government in 2017, the FPÖ took control of the interior ministry. The following year, police raided Austria’s domestic intelligence service and seized sensitive data, including information from allied agencies.
Thorsten Frei, right, Friedrich Merz, center, and Markus Söder, left, speak to media in Berlin on July 29, 2026. | Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesWestern intelligence partners then restricted the sharing of confidential information, while Austria’s service temporarily pulled back from working groups of the Bern Club — an informal network of Western intelligence services, officially on a voluntary basis.
Germany could face something similar under an AfD government, said von Notz, if for example the country’s allies suspected Russia would be able to access the database used by Germany’s domestic intelligence services to exchange information on extremists, spies and other security threats.
“The British, the Americans, the Poles, the Ukrainians — nobody would share information with us anymore for fear that everything would be passed on to Moscow,” warned the Green politician.
Option 3: Cut off their funds
Another instrument mentioned both by AfD figures and the party’s opponents is Germany’s fiscal equalization system, which helps poorer states with money from wealthier ones and additional federal funds.
Saxony-Anhalt has depended on this system for decades. In 2025, it received around €2.8 billion according to preliminary figures — nearly one-fifth of its state budget.
Reducing or even halting such payments would be one way to make life harder for an AfD government, or to coerce the party to behave in ways the political establishment finds acceptable. Within the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch, this scenario is seen as a real risk.
The legal hurdles, however, would be high. Danyal Bayaz, the Green finance minister of Baden-Württemberg, one of Germany’s wealthier contributor states, chose his words carefully. “The fiscal equalization system is anchored in the constitution and is not an instrument that can simply be changed according to the political weather,” he said.
He then added a caveat: A federal state based on solidarity, said Bayaz, depends on shared commitments to the rule of law. If a state government were to call those principles into question, or pursue legally dubious special paths, that would affect trust and cooperation with the federal government and other states, “including in financial matters.”
Bayaz’s spokesperson stressesdthat this was the minister’s personal assessment, not an agreed position of the state government — a coalition led by the Greens, with the CDU as its junior partner.
Option 4: Deploy the nuclear option
The most powerful constitutional instrument would be Bundeszwang, or federal coercion. Under Article 37 of Germany’s Basic Law, the federal government, with the consent of the Bundesrat — the chamber representing the states — may take “necessary measures” to compel a state to fulfill its legal obligations. In plain English: Berlin could force a state government to obey federal law.
The provision has never been used. In the reporting for this story, no one interviewed brought it up on their own — perhaps out of conviction, perhaps out of fear that merely mentioning it would play into the AfD’s hands before the elections.
Within AfD’s right-wing intellectual circles, federal coercion has long been treated as a realistic scenario. In 2025, publisher Götz Kubitschek, whose estate lies in Saxony-Anhalt and who the New York Times once labeled “the prophet of Germany’s new right,” told POLITICO this is what he would expect to see happen.
The entrance to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Cologne, Germany is pictured on Sept. 22, 2025. | Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty ImagesA potential trigger can only be guessed at. If, for example, an AfD government in Saxony-Anhalt failed to provide for even the most basic needs of asylum seekers, the federal government could intervene with binding orders to restore those services, eventually through a federal commissioner with the authority to issue instructions to the state and all its authorities.
Would all this work?
Whatever Germany’s political establishment does to contain the country’s first AfD government, this fall or later, the risks are obvious. Measures meant to defend liberal democracy could also feed the AfD’s central grievance and that of many of its voters: that the establishment refuses to accept the party even when it wins.
Public opinion on this is more divided than it once was. A representative poll from July found that only 42 percent of Germans still considered it right for the Social Democrats and the CDU to refuse cooperation with the AfD; another survey showed that support for the exclusion strategy had fallen to 46 percent, down from 54 percent in early 2025.
Doing nothing out of the ordinary may well be the safest option for established parties. The AfD has spent years thriving in opposition, turning its rivals’ mistakes and broken promises into political fuel. But it has never governed. Once in office, it could become mired in incompetence and internal infighting, sparing its opponents the need for special defensive maneuvers.
Key figures in the AfD’s own orbit are aware of this danger. “They have to prepare like the biggest overachievers,” Kubitschek told POLITICO in 2025 regarding Siegmund’s state party. Benedikt Kaiser, another influential far-right intellectual and aide to an AfD member of the Bundestag, also advised caution if the party wins an outright majority: “In the first 90 days of government, the AfD has to pursue a politics that does not create fear,” he said, mentioning “family benefits, free school meals, things like that” as examples.
Even as Germany’s political establishment considers ways to contain an AfD state government, the party’s intellectual leaders are fretting over a more immediate concern: Simply governing could prove a more effective constraint on the party than any measure the country’s political mainstream can devise.
[Image text:] LASST UNS GESCHICHTE SCHREIBEN! sCt