The Anti-AfD Firewall and Germany’s Problem with Democracy

by Sabine Beppler-Spahl

“No cooperation, no toleration, nothing at all”—that’s how German chancellor Friedrich Merz described his relationship with the right-populist AfD (Alternative for Germany). It’s a pledge he repeated once again this July, just before retreating into his summer break. “I will do everything in my power to stop Germany’s right-populists from gaining power,” he said.

“Brandmauer” (firewall) is the term used to describe the established parties’ joint pledge to exclude the populists from any meaningful parliamentary participation.

With important state elections due in September in three federal states, nervousness within the establishment over how long this Brandmauer can hold has reached fever pitch. The AfD, which has been topping national polls for months, is expected to emerge as the strongest party in at least two states. In one, Saxony-Anhalt, polls suggest the populists could become so strong that no government could be formed against them, a scenario Merz alluded to in his summer speech, and one that has led some within his own party to question the logic of a policy they now see as increasingly self-limiting.

In official rhetoric, the Brandmauer is aimed at a party and its leadership. In reality, it is also an attempt to quarantine the party’s voters—a voter base that has not shrunk but grown. In the February 2025 national election, the AfD came out as the second-strongest political force, securing over 20 percent of the vote. It is now polling at around 27 percent, comfortably ahead of the ruling CDU (polling at 22 percent).

As such, the Brandmauer is more than a technical matter of vote counts and coalition arithmetic. It goes to the heart of a basic question: who owns democracy?

“The firewall is not a tactical maneuver, but a shield for democracy. It protects us from a situation where parties that call into question our freedom, human dignity, and equality—in other words, the very foundations of our democracy—come to be regarded, step by step, as the norm,” says YouTuber and Green Party member Chantal Kopf.

The justification for excluding the biggest opposition party rests partly on Germany’s doctrine of “defensive democracy.” The AfD, the argument goes, is not a normal party: if allowed to expand unchecked, it will pull the country back into the abyss of far-right dictatorship. The doctrine was established after the war, ostensibly as a lesson drawn from the Nazi era. Intended to protect the fledgling democracy from any Nazi revival, it gives the state—governments and courts alike—far-reaching powers, including the power to ban parties deemed a threat to the constitutional order (“freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung”). The call to ban the party—a demand made by leading politicians from within all the mainstream parties—would of course be the most radical imposition of the Brandmauer.

But there is a deep flaw in the idea that democracy needs protecting from the people, the demos itself. And the firewall has had a genuinely corrosive effect on Germany’s democratic culture.

One such effect is that it has forced parties that would once have seen themselves standing at quite different, even opposite, ends of the political spectrum into what amount to permanent coalitions.

A case in point is Germany’s current, deeply unpopular governing coalition between the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD). Merz’s CDU was pushed into this arrangement after winning only 28 percent of the vote. Its coalition partner was even less popular: the SPD received just 16 percent, its worst result since the Second World War, making it the biggest loser of the election.

The result was that voters who wanted change, including many who had voted CDU precisely to get rid of the old guard, instead saw politics dominated once more by a party they had hoped to see gone. Small wonder that four out of five Germans today say they are dissatisfied with the government’s work. Part of this deep unpopularity stems from the fact that a coalition built this way can only ever reach compromises based on the lowest common denominator—and, tellingly, the chancellor’s own pre-summer-break assessment presented the coalition’s mere survival as its greatest achievement.

Then there are the self-restricting effects on parliamentary debate. The Brandmauer forbids parties from voting alongside the AfD on any issue, however minor. When a Green Party motion to protect small butcher shops passed in the Saxony state parliament in May with the help of AfD votes, it caused a scandal, and the Greens felt compelled to publicly distance themselves from their own vote.

The AfD has even been barred from forming a government in places where it won the election outright, as in Thuringia in 2024, where it took over 34 percent of the vote. Because every other party—including the Left Party, toward which the CDU officially also maintains a noncooperation policy—banded together, the post of minister-president went to the CDU instead. This was not an exclusion of the AfD based on failed negotiations, but an outcome of the pre-committed Brandmauer. AfD members are likewise excluded from standard parliamentary posts, such as deputy speaker or committee chair, that would normally go to the second-largest group.

All this has given the AfD a certain martyr status. It has also underscored a new political reality: an increasingly homogeneous party landscape, with the AfD in the role of the main, if not the only, opposition party.

As in other countries where populism has risen against a tired establishment, the AfD has long since stopped being a mere protest party and become a genuine movement for change. There is, of course, room for fair and rational criticism of the AfD—its continuing difficulty purging individual members who hold openly revisionist views of history, or its muted criticism of Putin’s authoritarianism, to name two. But there is more than a little authoritarianism in the effort to exclude—and, as some now demand, even ban—a party backed by roughly a quarter of the electorate.

It would be wrong to see the AfD’s success as simply a backlash against individual policy decisions. As the sociologist Frank Furedi argues, the rise of populism is driven by a broader rejection of the modern elite’s values: its embrace of multiculturalism, supranationalism, open borders, and net-zero, among others.

The barely concealed disdain often shown toward ordinary voters’ concerns has only fueled the party’s rise—disdain exemplified by Germany’s labor minister, Bärbel Bas (SPD), who in a May speech celebrating diversity argued that migration was needed not just for economic reasons but also to prevent a slide into what she called societal “Einheitsgrau” (uniform gray) or “Einheitsbraun” (uniform brown). With this, she implied that traditional German society was either dull (“gray”) or outright Nazi (“brown”). Her statement confirmed the suspicions of those who had long believed that the establishment’s embrace of mass migration was linked to attempts to change and “reform” society.

A lack of dissenting voices within the mainstream consensus contributed to the formation of the AfD in the first place. As early as 2012—a year before the party’s founding, at the height of the eurozone debt crisis, when every party in Germany had rallied behind Angela Merkel’s leadership—the sociologist Philip Manow described a “race to outdo one another in pro-EU rhetoric” between government and opposition, one that produced a sense of “complete powerlessness on the part of the sovereign, who is in fact the democratic authority.”¹

This uniformity of mainstream opinion has been repeated many times, not least in the decision to phase out nuclear power in favor of renewables. True, the Greens and the Left might want to reach net-zero somewhat faster than much of the CDU. Some parties have even promised stricter border controls in response to the AfD’s rise, though only within existing EU rules. But the underlying pattern holds: voters who want real change gravitate to the populists. The formation of a new governing coalition drawn entirely from the parties that have ruled Germany for decades—parties that many blame for the country’s deep social and economic problems—has only proven them right.

Supporters of the Brandmauer may invoke human rights and freedom, but their version of freedom clearly excludes one of the most important rights of all: the right of voters to express discontent with mainstream politics in a way that actually matters.

Democracy, as the American political scientist James Burnham wrote in 1943, means a political system built on liberty—a liberty “summed up and focused in the right of opposition, the right of the opponents of the currently governing élite to express publicly their opposition views and to organize to implement those views.”²

Until now, AfD voters have been able to express their concerns, and the populist opposition in Germany has grown so strong that no governing party can afford to ignore them. But the ever louder calls to ban the party outright, together with the ongoing effort to keep AfD politicians away from executive power, show that a serious problem remains.

Defending democracy means speaking out against the Brandmauer.

Sabine Beppler-Spahl is an economist and a freelance writer and author. She lives in Berlin and is chair of the liberal think tank Freiblickinstitut.

1. Philip Manow: “Ach, Europa—Ach, Demokratie,” Merkur 1/66 (January 2012): 22–23.

2. James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (London: Lume Books, 2020), p. 221.