The AfD took 44 percent in Saxony-Anhalt’s September 6 state election, and the German commentariat went looking for the one variable: a sprawling bureaucracy, a defective East German political culture, immigration. Gábor Scheiring’s argument in Jacobin is that single-variable diagnoses produce single-variable strategies, and they all fail — because the thing being diagnosed is general, not national.

The counter-evidence is mostly the AfD’s own base:

  • Founded in 2013 by highly educated neoliberal economists under Bernd Lucke; a portrait of Hayek hangs in the office of its parliamentary chief whip
  • 41 percent of first-time voters aged 18–24 in Saxony-Anhalt voted for it; 59 percent of workers did
  • Its strongest districts are predicted by density of craft and small industrial businesses, not by immigration — across the eastern states, the share of foreigners and the AfD vote are inversely related
  • Its biggest donors are large entrepreneurs: €1.5 million from Euroimmun’s founder, with a real-estate billionaire the largest known donor
  • Party family, not outlier: Europe’s hard right is now its most popular, polling above 1930s levels, and it governs or leads in India, Turkey, Hungary and the US across completely different institutional designs

The strategic half of the piece is a demolition of the three standard responses. A firewall makes defending the establishment the only common ground among the five mainstream parties, which hands “change” to the far right and leaves coalitions paralyzed from birth. Co-optation loses on the far right’s own terrain: Merz relied on AfD votes for a migration resolution in January 2025 and the AfD doubled its 2021 result four weeks later; the Danish Social Democrats collapsed to their worst result since 1903. “Let them govern” rests on the FPÖ’s 2002 collapse, which its 2024 first-place finish demolished.

The frame is Polanyi and Gramsci. Fascism was an exit from a stalemate between market expansion and society’s self-defense; crisis of authority sets in when an economic model is exhausted along with the institutions that reconciled capital’s growth with working people’s interests. What looks like “the crisis of the German economy” is the protracted exhaustion of Fordism — real wages flat since the early 1990s, eastern full-time wages 17 percent below western levels, food prices up 34.7 percent since 2021 against 14.8 percent wage growth, 89 percent of AfD voters fearing they cannot pay their bills.

Polanyi listed two exits from that paralysis. One was the deadly embrace of fascism. The other was social democracy — the answer history has so far not written for this crisis.