Analysis by Keith Rankin.
Role: Economic historian.
Keith Rankin, 10 September 2026 – Last Sunday’s state election in Germany was particularly interesting from an MMP point of view, as well as from a ‘direction of politics’ perspective.
In the chart above, results sourced from Wikipedia, I have made some changes to the parties’ colours, so as to better align with New Zealand’s colour schematics, and so as to show the different party-blocs more clearly. In particular, I have reversed the colours for the AFD and the CDU.
The chart shows that the four established ‘non-far-right’ parties gained 39 seats, the same as the ‘far-right’ AFD. It means that the relatively new BSW party – the party which got 4.98% of the vote in last year’s federal election – now has the balance of power in Saxony-Anhalt.
The Eastern Bloc
Not a bloc of parties, this is a bloc of both physical and political geography. The Eastern Bloc is most of the former DDR (East Germany), which was emancipated by the West in 1989 when the Walls – the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtin – came down. The exception is the political city of Berlin, which – like most national capital cities – is better known as a bastion of the liberal-left (aka the soft-left).
The liberal framing in Germany is that Germany’s Eastern Bloc is now becoming ‘pro-Putin’. Saxony-Anhalt in particular is considered by the Berlin elite to be a ‘fly-over state’. This evolving alignment with Russia is an interesting irony, because this is the part of Germany ‘liberated’ from Soviet Russia.
Magdeburg – the state capital of Saxony-Anhalt – is considered by the liberal-left to be Germany’s equivalent of Whanganui; and, indeed, it is a river city. (For me, Magdeburg was a ‘train-through’ rather than a ‘fly-over’ city. In 1974 I took a return train-trip from Hanover to Berlin; indeed East Germany was then an amazing place for ‘steam train buffs’. The trains from West Germany were, practically, sealed trains; like Lenin’s train in 1917. I remember the rather intimidating East German border guards waking everyone up at 3am. While I travelled at night in both directions, I do remember dawn over Magdeburg with a vista over the Elbe river; the river which culturally dominated, and traditionally divided, Germany. The three states with ‘Saxony’ in their names are the states of the Elbe; and of course Saxony – especially Lower Saxony – represents the origin of the English [Anglo-Saxon] people.)
There is another state election in the Eastern Bloc scheduled for 20 September, in Mecklenburg in the northeast.
The Liberal Bloc
The four parties in Germany which now constitute the Liberal Bloc are the four parties which, to a greater or lesser extent, have governed Germany since 1949. (And the SPD was Germany’s most significant governing political party in the pre-Nazi era.)
The word ‘liberal’ is today overused to the point of being meaningless. Nevertheless, in my context here, we can take that word in the context of its present geopolitical meaning; that meaning of ‘liberal’, in a nutshell, is ‘anti-Putin’. (We note that the words ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are not opposites today – neoliberalism and neoconservatism are essentially the same – and they have not always been opposites in history, either. The Australian Liberal Party is, and always was, a conservative party. The CDU – National in Germany, for a New Zealand context – can be understood as a liberal conservative right-wing party; whereas the AFD is non-liberal conservative right-wing, commonly labelled as ‘far-right’.)
In Saxony-Anhalt the national ruling parties – combined – got just 38% of the vote and 37% of the seats. (The discrepancy arises because the FPD – now equivalent to New Zealand’s ACT party- did not reach the 5% party-vote threshold.)
The four liberal parties operate a firewall against the ‘far-left’ as well as the ‘far-right’. Hence, grand coalitions have become normalised in German politics; the firewall has meant that the SPD has preferred to govern with right-wing parties than with Die Linke. In 2021, the SPD (like NZ Labour) formed a coalition which included FPD (like NZ ACT). [We remind ourselves that, in the New Zealand context, ACT was a breakaway from Labour, not from National.]
The firewall, as it has been generally applied, operates against parties which – in Saxony-Anhalt – have a combined total of 52 out of 83 seats. While the liberal parties may be softening in their attitudes towards Die Linke, it is not at all possible for Die Linke to align with the conservative CDU, the largest non-AFD party in the new Magdeburg parliament. Further, to form a government which excludes the AFD, the BSW also would have to join with the liberal parties.
The geopolitics underpinning the present political environment in Germany
In terms of geopolitics, the Liberal Bloc labels all parties which are not ‘anti-Putin’ as ‘pro-Putin’. It’s a case of, ‘if you are not with us you are against us’. Die Linke, rather than vocally opposing this framing, is now claiming to be both ‘anti-Putin’ and ‘pro-peace’. The BSW and AFD parties reject the liberal framing; they label themselves as ‘pro-peace’ and the liberal parties as ‘pro-war’. The BSW and AFD are more nuanced than their liberal opponents; they point out that there are three positions – not two – re the present European war. Russiaphobic, Ukraine-phobic, and neutral. They both favour neutrality.
The geopolitical debate – and it is the geopolitics as well as the economy which has driven this election result – is being conducted between ‘realists’ and ‘liberals’. The realist position favours an Eastern Europe which is neutral rather than western-aligned.
The philosophical opposite of ‘realism’ is ‘idealism’. Realism accepts the world as it is, warts and all, and seeks for peaceful resolutions which include the maintenance of balances of power; a multipolar world order, if you will. Idealism, in philosophy, sees the current world as an imperfect copy of an achievable ideal world; that the historical process is one of making – progressively – a world which is decreasingly imperfect. Reality supposedly evolves towards a unipolar perfection.
Liberal geopolitics is an example of Darwinian idealism; in particular where the good guys are ‘Democracies’ (with mainly European individualist values) and the bad guys are ‘Autocracies’ (with mainly Asian collectivist values), and – in order to achieve less imperfection – the Democracies must prevail in a power struggle against the Autocracies.
In liberal idealist geopolitical reasoning, if you are not pro-Democracy then you must be pro-Autocracy. And, to these idealists, a better world is a world in which Autocracy is eventually exterminated. (On the frontline is Jerusalem which is seen by many in the West – especially many ‘liberals’ in Germany – to be populated by a mix of liberal Eurosupremacist ‘good-guys’ and Asian autocracy-supporting ‘bad-guys’. This issue clearly separates Die Linke from, say, the SPD; pro-Palestinian Die Linke is not liberal in this sense.)
In 2026, however, it’s all a bit confusing to Germany’s shrinking liberal coalition; they look across the Atlantic Ocean and observe that global Democracy – the ‘free world’ – is currently led by a bullying unimpeachable narcissist autocrat; an autocrat who congratulates their AFD opponents, understood by these liberals as the growing domestic wing of the Enemy.
The Left Bloc
This is Die Linke and BSW. BSW split from Die Linke a few years ago, and is seen as representing the former ‘Communist’ wing of Die Linke. This split means that Die Linke is more acceptable to Germany’s liberal ruling class than is BSW. Further, on the left, BSW was relatively popular in the Eastern Bloc in the 2025 general election; Die Linke was more popular in the (larger) former West Germany. (See here for a conversation with the leader of the BSW: Sahra Wagenknecht: Europe Subjugated & Propagandised for War, The Greater Eurasia Podcast, 2025.)
So there is no real Left Bloc any more; just as AFD and FDP – parties well to the right – do not in any sense form a right-bloc.
To the liberals, especially the Berlin establishment, a nearby AFD state government supported on confidence by BSW would be tantamount to a Fascist-Communist alliance. On closer examination, however, the AFD leadership has more in common with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni than with Adolf Hitler. And the BSW has more in common with John Maynard Keynes than with Karl Marx; it’s economically ‘left’ and socially conservative (much as the New Zealand National Party was in the 1960s and 1970s).
There is an interesting framing, however, from the young German left; that the AFD is not really the right-wing ‘peace party’ which it proclaims itself to be, and that the establishment CDU has an agenda to push the peace-vote towards the Israel-sympathetic AFD and away from the Palestine-sympathetic left-wing parties. The supposition is that, sooner rather than later, the CDU will drop its liberal mask, form an alliance with the AFD; and that that alliance will then purge itself of its peace-favouring faction. (Refer How the AFD is using Israel to Rebrand Germany’s Far Right, BreakThrough News, 9 Sep 2026.)
Finally
Germany is a country undergoing societal collapse – as in the Great Depression of 1930 to 1933 – and which is only keeping its economy ‘above-water’ by resorting to militarism. In the 1930s, the liberals failed big-time, and the population turned to the far-right for solutions. This time, it looks like the failing ‘liberals’ may be morphing into a new-far-right. The SPD – Germany’s equivalent of New Zealand’s Labour Party – is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the process.
About the writer:
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.