# How Germany's Wall Against the AfD Ended Up Breaking Its Politics > The Brandmauer was built to keep the far right out of power and to protect German democracy. A decade on, it is distorting the very system it was meant to defend, and the party it was designed to contain has never been stronger. - Source: Morning Week - Canonical URL: https://morningweek.com/article/how-germany-s-wall-against-the-afd-ended-up-breaking-its-politics - Author: Morning Week Newsroom - Section: Europe - Published: 2026-08-17T10:56:46.049Z - Updated: 2026-08-17T10:56:46.049Z - Tags: Germany, AfD, Brandmauer, Friedrich Merz, CDU, far right, elections, coalitions --- Germans have a word for the barrier their mainstream parties have built against the hard right. They call it the Brandmauer, the firewall, and for years it functioned as a point of national pride, proof that the country which gave the world its worst lesson in extremism had learned it better than anyone. The rule was simple. No established party would govern with the Alternative for Germany, cooperate with it, or in its strictest form even negotiate with it. The far right could be voted for, but it could never be allowed to win. The trouble is that the wall was designed for a party the AfD no longer is. When it was a fringe of protest voters, quarantining it cost little. Today the Alternative for Germany leads the national polls, drawing around 27 percent against roughly 22 percent for Friedrich Merz's governing Christian Democrats. A device built to contain a nuisance is now being asked to contain the most popular party in the country, and the strain is showing everywhere. ## The arithmetic of exclusion The first casualty is coherent government. To keep a party polling near a third of the vote out of power, everyone else must huddle together, which means parties that agree on almost nothing forming coalitions for the sole purpose of exclusion. Christian Democrats govern with Social Democrats, sometimes with Greens, occasionally with all of them at once, not because they share a programme but because the alternative is unthinkable. The result is a politics of the lowest common denominator, cautious, blurred and slow, in which the differences voters thought they were choosing between dissolve into a single governing blob. That blurring is a gift to the AfD, and it knows it. Every awkward coalition of rivals confirms the story the party tells about itself, that the old parties are a cartel that closes ranks against the people, that voting for anyone but the AfD changes nothing because the same faces return in different combinations. The firewall was meant to make the party look dangerous. Increasingly it makes the party look like the only real opposition, which in a formal sense it now is. ## The east breaks first Nowhere is the wall cracking faster than in the eastern states, where the AfD is not merely popular but dominant. In places such as Saxony-Anhalt the party is polling strongly enough that no conventional government could be assembled against it without stitching together every other faction into a fragile bloc. When a single party wins a plurality and is still denied any share of power, the exclusion starts to look less like a defence of democracy and more like a defiance of it, and ordinary voters notice the contradiction. Some Christian Democrats have noticed too. Michael Kretschmer, the premier of Saxony, has openly questioned whether his party can keep refusing even to talk to a movement that so many of his constituents support, warning that a blanket ban looks ever more untenable on the ground. He speaks for a growing eastern wing of the party that has to win actual elections in places where the AfD sets the terms, and for whom the firewall is not an abstraction but a straitjacket. ## Merz holds the line At the top, Friedrich Merz refuses to bend. The chancellor has rebuffed calls from within his own ranks to soften the policy, insisting the AfD remains beyond the pale and cannot be a partner in government or even a normal interlocutor. His position has the great virtue of moral clarity and the great weakness of colliding with electoral reality, since polls now suggest a majority of Germans are open to some form of cooperation between the established parties and the AfD, whatever their leaders say. Merz is caught in a genuine bind, not a foolish one. To drop the firewall would be to normalise a party many of whose figures traffic in exactly the rhetoric postwar Germany swore off, and to hand it the legitimacy it craves. To keep the firewall is to go on governing through unstable coalitions that satisfy no one and to let the AfD pose indefinitely as the martyr of a rigged system. There is no comfortable option left, only a choice between two kinds of damage. ## A wall that feeds what it blocks This is the paradox at the heart of the German predicament. The firewall was built on the sound instinct that some forces are too dangerous to share power with, and in the short run it has kept the AfD out of every government that matters. Yet by freezing a quarter or more of the electorate out of the bargaining that produces governments, it has hollowed out the centre it was meant to protect, sharpened the sense of grievance it was meant to soothe, and helped the far right grow rather than shrink. Whether the wall holds or falls, the politics behind it has already changed. A country that once pointed to its Brandmauer as a model for the democratic world is discovering that a wall is only as strong as the consensus behind it, and that consensus is crumbling from the east inward. The question Germans now face is no longer whether they can keep the AfD out forever, but what kind of democracy they will have left by the time they stop trying. --- Originally published by Morning Week. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://morningweek.com/article/how-germany-s-wall-against-the-afd-ended-up-breaking-its-politics.