--- title: "Europe’s Far Right Draws the Line at Germany’s Record-Winning AfD" description: "Wilders, Orbán and Trump cheered the Saxony-Anhalt result. Paris, Rome and London kept their distance." author: "Tomasz Idle" published: 2026-09-27T04:34:38.036Z modified: 2026-09-27T05:12:22Z url: https://rews.cc/a/europe-s-far-right-draws-the-line-at-germany-s-record-winnin-8290e2 language: en tags: ["politics", "trump", "economy", "germany", "far-right", "europe", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Europe’s Far Right Draws the Line at Germany’s Record-Winning AfD *Wilders, Orbán and Trump cheered the Saxony-Anhalt result. Paris, Rome and London kept their distance.* By Tomasz Idle · September 27, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/europe-s-far-right-draws-the-line-at-germany-s-record-winnin-8290e2 ## In brief - The AfD won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt, three seats short of a majority; fringe parties also gained in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin - France’s National Rally, which broke with the AfD in May 2024, says renewed cooperation is ‘not planned’ - Meloni calls the parties’ foreign policy differences ‘irreconcilable’; Farage calls the AfD a ‘mixed bag’ - The AfD sits in the small Europe of Sovereign Nations group with Reconquest, Revival, Our Homeland, New Hope and Republic Movement - Trump congratulated the AfD and signed off ‘MGGA!’; Musk also welcomed the result For some years now, Europe’s far right has been in the detergent business. The French call it *detoxification*, which is Marine Le Pen’s own word for the long scrub she has given the National Rally: out with the overt xenophobia of her father’s party and the Nazi past of two of its founders, in with softer rhetoric, mixed-race members and, since October 7, conspicuous condemnations of antisemitism. The hope is to emerge clean enough for the Elysée in 2027. Every laundry, though, has a stain it cannot shift. Europe’s happens to speak German. Earlier this month the Alternative for Germany won 43.8% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, an historic result that left it three seats short of an outright majority. Elections last weekend in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin showed the same voters leaving the mainstream parties for the fringes, notably the AfD. Congratulations arrived from Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom, Viktor Orbán of Hungary’s Fidesz and Santiago Abascal of Spain’s Vox, who hailed the advance as “a great hope for Germany and Europe.” From the biggest far-right parties in France, Italy and Britain, there was a silence you could fold and put in a drawer. The National Rally, once one of the AfD’s closest partners in the European Parliament, said before the Saxony-Anhalt vote that renewed cooperation was “not planned.” The rupture dates to May 2024, when one senior AfD figure too many talked down the criminal role of Hitler’s SS, and reporting revealed a secret party plan to expel people of foreign origin en masse. Both crossed the RN’s red lines, and an alliance stopped being compatible with the new image. “We have real problems on both style and substance. We do not consider them to be our allies in Germany,” RN lawmaker Franck Allisio told the LCI channel on September 6, the day of the vote. Grégoire Roos, who directs the Europe, Russia and Eurasia programs at Chatham House, put the contrast bluntly to CNN. “Unlike the National Rally that has worked extremely hard to wipe out any morally disturbing elements… the AfD hasn’t conducted such a clean-up,” he said. Figures in the AfD, he noted, are comfortable discussing the Nazi era as though not everything from it should be “thrown in the garbage.” The party rejects accusations of right-wing extremism, and its co-leaders have dismissed the extremist classification by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency as an attempt to “distort democratic competition.” The AfD is not completely friendless. Éric Zemmour’s more radical French outfit, Reconquest, welcomed the Saxony-Anhalt result, with the MEP Sarah Knafo calling it “historic” in an election-night post. “The European peoples have shown a great deal of patience. Today, they want to take their destiny back into their own hands. An entire continent is rising up,” she wrote. After being expelled from the Identity and Democracy group, the AfD helped found the Europe of Sovereign Nations group in the European Parliament, a smaller and more isolated club that also includes Bulgaria’s Revival, Hungary’s Our Homeland Movement, Poland’s New Hope and Slovakia’s Republic Movement. It is the parliamentary equivalent of sitting at the table by the kitchen door. Giorgia Meloni has opted for a different strategy entirely: influence inside the mainstream. Her Brothers of Italy sits in the European Conservatives and Reformists group, supports NATO and Ukraine, and wants nothing to do with a party that opposes sending weapons to Kyiv and wants sanctions on Russia lifted. Meloni has called the differences “irreconcilable.” Nigel Farage, who leads Britain’s Reform UK, described the AfD as a “mixed bag” on an April podcast with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner. “I think the pro-Putin stuff, I find it hard to understand,” he said, adding that the AfD’s ties to some dictators were “very, very difficult.” The foreign policy is, by general agreement, the sticking point. The AfD contains competing currents on relations with Russia and the United States, but its warmth toward Moscow and its hard line against aid to Ukraine set it apart from much of the European right. The party is “very much radical when it comes to Ukraine and Russia,” Roos believes. “Listening to the AfD, you would almost feel like Russia has not invaded Ukraine, that Russia is not committing crimes every single day in Ukraine or killing civilians.” (Russia has repeatedly denied targeting civilians.) Parties like the RN have also worked to disassociate themselves from Moscow and Beijing, while the AfD has not; last year its links to China surfaced when a former top party aide was convicted in Germany of spying for Beijing. Where Europe’s rebranded right sees a liability, Washington sees a friend. Donald Trump took to social media to congratulate the AfD on its Saxony-Anhalt landslide, signing off with a German variant of his own slogan, “MGGA!” Elon Musk, who has championed the party for years, also expressed his delight. That embrace carries its own cost back home: Roos points out that the AfD maintains a “strong association with Trump and the MAGA movement, which in France, like many European countries, has become increasingly unpopular.” Hypothetically, Roos says, big regional gains for the AfD would translate into pressure for a strong nationalist agenda and, at the European level, for closer ties with Moscow and the lifting of oil and gas sanctions. He adds two caveats: German foreign policy is vested in the chancellor’s office, which limits sudden shifts, and German democracy retains an independent judiciary and a constitutional court built to keep political power in check. The firewall, in other words, is institutional rather than fraternal. Which leaves the continent’s other far-right parties with an unlovely dilemma. If the AfD keeps growing, ignoring it gets harder; embracing it is expensive for parties trying to prove they can move from the margins into government. For now, the biggest names in European nationalism have chosen the oldest trick in the trade: they have washed their own laundry and declined to be seen near the AfD’s. You can rebrand your party, it turns out. Rebranding the company you keep is somebody else’s job.