On two occasions over the past fortnight, information from inside a political party has leaked into the public domain against the party’s wishes. Both are revealing, but for different reasons.

First, we had the leak of more than 400,000 emails from the AfD’s email server, covering a period stretching back a decade. The server was hacked by pr…

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Barely a day goes without some public figure comparing Germany’s current circumstances to the rise of the Nazis. The AfD are the successor party to the Nazis and so must be banned… or so the logic goes.

But what does a historian who specialises in the Nazi era think of such comparisons?

To find out, I spoke to Heike Görtemaker, one of Germany’s most prominent historians of the Nazi dictatorship. Her widely acclaimed biography of Eva Braun was an international bestseller, and her latest book examines the workings of Hitler’s inner court.

Listen to the podcast to hear what she thinks of the debate.

Is modern Europe borderless, or are we living in a dangerous illusion conjured by the disappearance of border posts and other physical infrastructure?

This question began troubling voters during the refugee influx of 2015, when borders were permeable enough to allow migrants to travel deep into the EU, but the system for returning them to the…

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I have been in bed sick so far this week, so will have to keep this newsletter short.

After the state election in Berlin, won by the hard-left Die Linke, the Greens and Social Democrats are following a strategy that I have long said would be a more effective solution than the rather idiotic system of the Brandmauer.

Instead of rejecting a coal…

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A month after an armed drone struck a freight plane at Leipzig Airport but failed to detonate, the German government officially blamed Russia.

On September 1st, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt cited the similarity to previous drone incursions, initial findings by the police and intelligence reports as the reason for his confidence. “Taken together, they prove that Russia was responsible,” he said.

Germany closed Russian House, a state-run Russian cultural institute, in response. It also promised tougher measures against Moscow’s shadow fleet, the oil tankers that pass through the Baltic under false flags to bypass EU sanctions.

Eight days later, the Berliner Zeitung offered its readers a different account of what happened on the tarmac of Leipzig Airport on August 4th. According to an insider account, the drone in question was actually flown by a plane spotter and wasn’t big enough to carry an explosive device, the newspaper reported. Furthermore, airport staff hadn’t seen any explosives in the vicinity of the drone and were very surprised to see camera crews turn up so soon afterwards.

What was the basis for this incredible story, with its barely disguised insinuation of a massive conspiracy involving journalists, airport staff and politicians? Had the Berliner Zeitung researched the timeline of events itself? Had it talked to airport staff to try to corroborate the details of what exactly took place? Had it done its own investigation of the drone and its ability to carry extra weight?

None of the above.

Instead, the entire article was based on a social media post by a Ukrainian blogger who claimed to have spoken with an anonymous member of the airport staff. The staff member couldn’t be named because he feared for his job. At the top of the article, the newspaper suggested that the blogger’s nationality was proof of the credibility of the story. Why, after all, would a Ukrainian spread a story that helps Russia? Only at the very bottom does the article concede that the blogger, a certain Anatolij Shariy, is a “controversial figure” in his homeland.

That’s one way of putting it. Shariy, who set up a pro-Russian political party in 2019, lives in exile in Spain and is wanted by Ukrainian authorities over his alleged connections to the Kremlin. On his X account, he casts doubt on every Russian hybrid attack on Europe. Partisan would be a mild description.

Nonetheless, his allegations about a cover-up at Leipzig Airport have fallen on interested ears inside the AfD. “They faked the whole thing,” insisted Rainer Rothfuß, a Bundestag member for the hard-right party, adding: “It shows you how desperate this shitty government is.” Higher up the party, AfD foreign affairs spokesman Markus Frohnmaier said that he “and millions of Germans” believed that the government was lying about Russian culpability.

What to make of this strange attempt to reshape the narrative around the Leipzig drone attack? Is it simple naivety, or is something more sinister at work?

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Exactly seven years ago, I interviewed a 21-year-old woman, Katja, outside of a Jewish supermarket in Berlin.

It was 2019 and a far-right terrorist had just tried to storm a synagogue in Halle on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. He failed to get inside, but killed two people nearby.

While Katja was shaken up, gazing at the two security guards at a synagogue across the street, she was hopeful that life for Jews in Germany wouldn’t get any worse.

She was proud of her identity, she told me, and didn’t want to live in fear.

I thought of Katja last month as I hastened my pace walking past the same supermarket and synagogue, which is now barricaded by large metallic slabs. It too has been repeatedly targeted. In one incident, two masked attackers hurled Molotov cocktails at the building.

Seven years after Halle, life for many Jews in Berlin has not gotten any easier. Quite the opposite.

But the ideological landscape has changed. Whereas the far-right once accounted for the overwhelming majority of recorded antisemitic offences, Berlin's police statistics now show a much more fragmented picture. The largest category is what authorities classify as ‘foreign ideology’, a category that includes Israel-related and Islamist extremism.

That’s fuelled a wider debate over whether antisemitism associated with parts of the Middle East has been imported through migration. But the statistics don’t allow such a simple conclusion: “foreign ideology” describes a political motivation, not the ethnicity, religion or migration history of the perpetrator.

One thing is clear: Since Hamas’ attack on Israel on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah three years ago — and the devastating war that has followed — antisemitic incidents in Berlin have surged.

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September 20th was a particularly bad day to be Friedrich Merz.

The chancellor admitted his CDU losses in state elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania amounted to a “disaster”, yet insisted that he’ll stay the course. Meanwhile, his approval barely hovers in the double digits, and two- thirds of Germans don’t expect him to make it to the 2029 federal election.

Critics float some version of the same argument: heed the cries of “Merz muss weg,” put someone more popular in the Bundeskanzleramt and maybe, just maybe, Germany can get back on track.

So let’s try a little thought experiment. Imagine Merz disappears from the Chancellery tomorrow and, instead of Hendrik Wüst or Markus Söder… Angela Merkel walks back in.

Yes, that Merkel. Germany’s chancellor of sixteen years. The one who steered the country through the financial crisis, the euro crisis, the refugee crisis and the pandemic – a long string of successes that earned her the moniker Mutti, the mother of the nation. Even in September 2016, amid bitter arguments over her refugee policy, just under half of Germans said they were satisfied with Merkel’s work. For Merz, that would be an extraordinary level of approval.

Part of the difference boils down to communication. Where Merkel was understated and cautious, Merz is emphatic and speaks from the hip. Where she was calm, he is emotional. Merkel was also skilled at compromise, moving towards the centre, and blurring distinctions with her opponents.

Given the instability since she retired, it’s hardly surprising that some Germans still look back with nostalgia on the Merkel years.

But would Germany really be better off under her chancellorship right now?

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There is something charmingly old fashioned about small-town German life. At the centre of it is the local bank. Whereas in rural Britain, local branches of banks have been reduced to the status of in-person cash machines, with little authority left to make decisions on loans and financing, the Sparkasse is still a linchpin of German life outside the big cities.

What we call postbox red is Sparkasse-rot to Germans. Whether it be at a charity evening or a sporting event, the bank’s official colour is everywhere. In town, the head of the local Sparkasse is still a big name. He, or she, is the head of an organisation that looks after pensioners in small villages and major local employers alike.

The idea of a Sparkasse is something that seems quite unique to Germany. First set up in the 18th century, it is a system of publicly owned banks whose purpose goes beyond maximising profits. They have a mandate to foster local business and provide financial services in rural areas. Their profits go back into the bank or are used to support local projects and charities.

They are also highly decentralised. Although their number has fallen sharply in recent decades, there are still more than 340 separate Sparkassen around today, each with its own bank managers and supervisory board. Under the so-called regional principle, each Sparkasse is generally restricted to serving its own municipality or district.

At the same time, all of the Sparkassen exist under the umbrella of the German Savings Banks Association, or DSGV, and belong to a mutual protection scheme. If one gets into serious trouble, other members of the system can step in to support it.

The Sparkasse thus combines the local knowledge of a small bank with the security of a much larger financial network.

For countries looking for answers to Germany’s remarkable distribution of wealth throughout its regions, a closer look at the Sparkassen is a must. The UK’s House of Lords published a report this year that highlighted the benefits of the Sparkassen system. In contrast to Britain’s highly centralised banks that rely on data to make lending decisions, Sparkassen rely on local expertise. Sparkassen are much “better at assessing local regional conditions and, therefore, prepared to lend,” one expert told the committee.

For the regular customer, the Sparkasse model also fits with Germany’s strong culture of saving rather than investing. Traditionally, Sparkassen have promised security to customers. The image was reassuringly conservative: their money wouldn’t be gambled away in the capitalist casino abroad -- and they’d get steady interest on their savings.

This risk-averse attitude served the Sparkassen well during the 2008 financial crisis. Unexposed to the US subprime mortgage market, the Sparkassen were back in the black by 2009. A report published last year by the UK government found that in the five years after the financial crisis, lending by Sparkassen increased by 15 per cent, while UK bank lending shrank by 25 per cent.

Ironically, it was commercial competitors that needed government support to survive the crisis. The German government stepped in to establish a €500 billion financial stabilisation package to save the likes of Commerzbank, whose risky investments threatened to bring down the financial system.

But is the story of the Sparkasse purely one of the genial, moustachioed bank manager thinking about the long-term interests of the community that he belongs to?

That would, admittedly, be a somewhat too rosy description of the world of local German banking.

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The AfD’s method of breaking taboos speaks primarily to young men.

At the 2025 federal election, crowds chanted “Alice für Deutschland” at speeches given by AfD leader Alice Weidel. The chant is a barely hidden reference to “Alles für Deutschland”, a slogan used by the SA, the Nazi paramilitary organisation whose members beat up Jews and poli…

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The polling suggested that a major upset was on the cards. Nonetheless, it would have taken a fearless gambler to actually bet on it.

And then it happened: in the state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sunday, the CDU fell below the 5 percent cut-off to make it into the state parliament.

Friedrich Merz called the result a “disaster”. That’s putting it mildly. For a party that, until not so long ago, could claim to be Germany’s only Volkspartei, it was an abject humiliation. A Volkspartei is a party whose popularity cuts across class and region — not making it into a state parliament puts the CDU into the same bracket as the Tierschutzpartei (Animal Protection Party) and dozens of other groups on the tail end of Germany’s ballot paper.

In the entire 77-year history of the modern German republic, the CDU has never even come close to such a humiliation. You have to go back to the year 1951 – when the CDU won 9 percent of the vote in the city state of Bremen – to find anything remotely comparable.

As if that weren’t enough, in Berlin’s state election the CDU dropped 10 percent of its vote on Sunday, leaving the hard-left Die Linke to claim victory on a pledge to expropriate private housing.

The results came at the end of a month that began with the AfD almost winning an absolute majority in the state election in Saxony-Anhalt. The sense of existential dread inside the CDU is palpable.

So, where do things go from here? Five scenarios.

Merz throws the SPD out of his coalition

What is important to note about Sunday’s result in Mecklenburg is not just how badly the CDU lost, but how the SPD almost won.

State leader Manuela Schwesig (SPD) fought a campaign that was officially against the AfD (she called herself die Frau gegen Blau) but was, in reality, against Merz. She loudly rejected a central plank of Merz’ reform plan — the abolition of the right to a full pension after 45 years of work — while also demanding that the federal government cut fuel taxes. Meanwhile, her rants against Merz at closed-door SPD executive committee meetings somehow leaked to the press.

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Organised by Die Linke, the weeklong pop-up canteen was meant to bring the party’s core message of Berlin bezahlbar machen (Make Berlin affordable) off its posters and onto a plate.

The party wants at least one publicly funded Kiezkantine in every Berlin district, with the cheapest hot meal costing no more than €3. The idea, it says, comes in response to rapidly rising food prices and as a way to bring back affordable communal spaces.

“Berlin is going in the direction of Paris or London, and we have a chance to change that before it’s too late,” said Charlotte, 36, who was volunteering outside at a table covered with party literature in several languages.

Red-lettered pamphlets pitched the expropriation of large private landlords, building thousands of new affordable apartments, and simply opening and renovating more public swimming pools around the capital.

Their messages are clearly packing a punch. In the latest polling, Die Linke stood at 21 percent, just ahead of the CDU, at 20 percent.

If those polls turn into actual votes today that will mark quite the turnaround. Last time out, in 2023, Die Linke took just 12 percent whereas the CDU won the election with 28 percent of the vote.

While CDU’s efforts at re-election have been damaged by city mayor Kai Wegner standing down over revelations that he lied about his whereabouts when the city was hit by a winter blackout, Die Linke have focused relentlessly on the ruling coalition’s weak spot: skyrocketing rents.

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There is only one man who can save the CDU now—and he isn’t even a member of the Christian Democrats.

Yes, the time for Markus Söder, the bombastic, self-aggrandising Bavarian premier, has arrived.

Various names are being discussed as successors to Friedrich Merz, but Söder is the only one capable of returning the CDU to its former status as a Volkspartei—a party whose appeal cuts across class and region.

With Merz teetering on the brink after a humiliating loss to the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, the rumour mill has gone into overdrive. Further defeats are already looming in Berlin and Mecklenburg, fuelling speculation about an inner-party coup against the luckless chancellor.

Other names being discussed include Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and Hesse state leader Boris Rhein. Neither stands a realistic chance.

There are only two serious candidates to take over.

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What explains the fact that the CDU did even worse than expected in Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt?

The answer to that question might just tell us whether Friedrich Merz’s time as chancellor is up before it really began.

Polling showed the CDU on course for around 23 percent. That in itself would have been a dreadful result. At the last election in the eastern state, in 2021, the CDU won comfortably with 37 percent. In the end, though, the chancellor’s party didn’t even make 18 percent.

Ask Merz why things went so wrong and he will point to a traitor within his ranks.

“A deputy faction leader from the Bundestag … kept stabbing the leadership in the back in the days before the election,” Mr Merz told a press conference on Monday.

Summoning his inner Ceaușescu, Merz said that, when he mentioned the betrayal at a meeting with the party’s executive committee, his comments were “met with long and sustained applause.”

The traitor in question was Sepp Müller, aged just 37 but already deputy CDU leader in the Bundestag. Ahead of the election, he went on the attack against the hard-left Die Linke and said on Sunday that the AfD had won the right to govern.

Merz had been planning to create another state government where a weak CDU state leader relies on votes from the hard left to pass legislation, as they currently do in Saxony and Thuringia. He was furious that Müller had tried to throw a wrench into the strategy, blaming this for tactical voters switching to left-wing parties.

This is, to put it mildly, crusty communist dictator-level delusion over the causes of the crisis.

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Four hours after the first results came in from the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, a lot is still up in the air.

What is clear is that the AfD has scored a victory that goes even beyond what the polls suggested it would achieve. The first exit polls are putting it at over 44 per cent. The populist party’s candidate for state leader, Ulrich Siegmund, ran, by all accounts, a very impressive campaign.

Even the broadsheet media, which are almost universally hostile to his party, concede that Siegmund is a talented campaigner who managed to draw huge crowds to his soapbox-style campaign.

One analyst I spoke to last week said that Siegmund is the first AfD politician whose central message is a positive or optimistic one. Driving around on a GDR moped and talking about bringing back “the good old times”, he managed to create a sense that Saxony-Anhalt was at the avant-garde of a new counter-revolution in German democracy that would sweep away the old elite and bring about a conservative revival.

It looks, however, as though the AfD has just missed out on an overall majority.

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The upcoming state election in Saxony-Anhalt is being described as one of the most important votes in German history. You could view that as part of the hyperbole surrounding the breakdown of functioning German governance. But the narrative is not wholly without reason. And with it comes the possibility of real disruption after the vote.

At the start of campaigning a month ago, the AfD set itself the target of winning an outright majority, an extremely rare occurrence in Germany’s multi-party system. The AfD candidate for state governor, Ulrich Siegmund, has even said that he is not prepared to enter any sort of coalition. It is either all or nothing, he has said in speeches. The bombastic claim is slightly beside the point, however, as no other party seems willing to enter into a coalition with the populist group.

Winning an overall majority would be quite the way for the AfD to elect its first state leader. The only time it has previously won the largest share of the vote, in Thuringia in 2024, an unwritten law of German parliamentarianism would suggest that it had the right to build a coalition. Instead, it was shut out by the other parties. The result was a coalition in which a CDU minister-president is reliant on the anti-capitalist Die Linke party to pass legislation.

If the AfD pulls off this feat, it will be the first time that a party to the right of the CDU has taken control of a state parliament in the history of modern Germany.

At the start of campaigning in July, polling showed the AfD on 43 percent. With the right maths of smaller parties failing to make the 5 percent cut-off, that could be enough to give it an overall majority of seats. Since then, though, the party’s polling share has dropped slightly to around 40 percent, making the chances of an outright majority somewhat thinner.

For Germany, which takes its historic responsibility to keep far-right parties out of government very seriously, it would be a watershed moment – and the clearest proof yet that centrist parties’ previous attempts to win back voters from the AfD have been a complete failure.

Why might Saxony-Anhalt in particular be the place where the AfD scores its first major election victory? Timing, no doubt, plays a role. The results of state elections are as much a statement on voter satisfaction with federal politics as they are about any local issue. Friedrich Merz’s government is historically unpopular – no mean feat given the disregard in which his predecessor, Olaf Scholz, was held. In voting for the AfD, voters are rejecting a centrist consensus that they blame for inflation, higher living costs and job losses in manufacturing.

But state capital Magdeburg was also the site of the worst in a long line of massacres committed by migrants from the Middle East against the local population. Two years ago, shortly before Christmas, a man called Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove a 4x4 into the packed Weihnachtsmarkt in the city centre, ploughing the vehicle through the narrow alleys. Eyewitnesses later recounted harrowing scenes of the wheels spinning over a pile of crushed bodies. Six people, the youngest just nine years old, died in the atrocity. Over 300 more were injured.

Strikingly, that crime has barely featured in the discussion of why the people of Saxony-Anhalt have swung in such great numbers towards the AfD, which has put the far-right Kampfbegriff “remigration” front and centre of its manifesto.

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There is nothing particularly unusual about a photo ending a political career.

In the unforgiving world of British politics, a single image in the hands of a tabloid can be fatal. Labour leader Ed Miliband never recovered from his failure to eat a bacon sandwich. Covid-era health minister Matt Hancock was finished by an image of him kissing a…

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Last week, I sent you three editions of a new German Brief designed to give you a quick overview of the most important news from Germany.

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In Germany, rental costs are rising sharply and so are energy bills.

The cause of both problems is supply shortages. On rents, city administrators can’t build fast enough to keep up with the number of people moving to big cities. For energy, geopolitical turmoil is restricting access to natural gas, which is key for winter heating and electricity production.

The solution to both problems is obvious enough, even if it is hard to implement. Build more houses and you will calm the rental market; source more gas and you will bring energy prices down.

Instead, solutions are being discussed that, at best, would do nothing to ease the problem, at worst, would just push bills higher.

Next month, Berlin is to hold its third state election in five years. Headlining the election is the question of whether the city should seize properties from the private sector as an alleged cure for spiralling rental costs.

A proposal to do just that won a majority at a citywide referendum in 2021. Now, the hard-left Die Linke party says it wants to enact the result of that plebiscite. A month ahead of the vote, Die Linke have a narrow lead in polling.

Under the plan, the city would expropriate around a quarter of a million rental properties from large property owners and put them into the public hand.

Obviously, in a Rechtsstaat, you can’t just seize property from a private owner.

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As one of my most engaged readers, I’d really value your feedback.

Last week, I sent you three editions of a new German Brief designed to give you a quick overview of the most important news from Germany.

I’m considering making the Brief a permanent addition to The German Review as part of Substack’s Founding Member tier. Existing paying subscrib…

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