Stopping the AFD Starts in the West, Where 70% of Their Voters Live
A look at election data shows that the AFD's strength comes from the West.
When politicians and scholars argue about the dangers the far-right AFD poses to German Democracy and discuss how the party’s rise to power could be stopped, they quite often focus on the AFD’s strength in Eastern Germany. Granted, there is some merit to that: The AFD is polling at around 40% in most of East Germany, and they could win an outright majority in upcoming elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony-Anhalt, a horror scenario for all other parties. However, the unyielding debate about the AFD’s strength in the East is likely distorting the bigger picture.
Many German voters have the impression that the AFD is largely a problem in Eastern Germany, even in Federal Elections. After all, this is how the parties performed in each state in the 2025 election:
This is an image most Germans are familiar with. It shows that the AFD achieved monumental results in Eastern Germany (32% to 38%) while struggling to get half that vote share in the West (10.9 to 21.6%). It could just as well be a depiction of German borders before reunification in 1990. Most importantly, it’s the map that has misled many Germans to believe that the AFD draws most of its strength from the East. Why? Because of something German voters don’t usually have to think about: Population density.
While population density is ever-present in American Elections - with the Electoral College awarding votes based on a state’s population - Germany’s electoral system is proportional, so voters don’t have to think about population all that often. The consequence is that some believe that the AFD’s federal results are powered by the East. Former East Germany’s land mass makes up about a third of modern Germany, while accounting for just above 15% of the total population. So in reality, the AFD’s 20,8% vote share in 2025 wasn’t powered by the East, it was powered by the West. Here’s a map showing you where the AFD’s 10,3 million votes came from.
Yes, this looks very similar to a map of population totals in each state. Most AFD votes (1.77 million) came out of North-Rhine Westfalia, the most populous German state, the 2nd most (1,52 million) came out of Bavaria, the 2nd most populous state. The fact that a political party gets the most votes out of the most populous state isn’t particularly newsworthy, but it is key to understanding an important aspect of stopping the AFD.
The AFD’s election results in 2025 had the following composition: Of the 20,8% that the Party won federally, only 5,8% came from Eastern Germany, and 15% came from the West. Meaning, even if other parties found a miracle recipe against the AFD’s success in the East and were able to obliterate them from existence there, the AFD would still stand at 15% nationally, just six points down from their record result. Focusing your resources to battle the AFD on their home turf for just a few points federally seems like an uneven balance of needed effort compared to netted results, and that’s not even taking Germany’s structural divides into account.
Re-unified Germany is a young nation, 35 years to be exact. The East is still suffering from structural setbacks. People who live in Eastern Germany get paid lower wages and lower pensions. They are more likely to drop out of school or become unemployed, and they have much less urbanization than the West. In other words, it’s the perfect environment for parties from the edges of the political spectrum, and this has been the case long before the AFD became popular. The structural difficulties and the feeling of being left behind that many East Germans have make it incredibly difficult for other parties to make inroads. There have also been many reports about hostility and violence against politicians of the Greens, the SPD, and the Left. It’s, of course, important that these parties keep fighting for votes in the East and do not abandon the states to the AFD, which would only deepen the polarization already existing between East and West. But they could consider what the most effective path to limiting the AFD’s success actually looks like.
Any movement in the populous Western States - states that provide less favorable territory for the AFD - is much more significant than movement in the East. As I’ve just shown, the AFD would still end up with 15% nationally even if they were magically erased from their strongholds in East Germany, a highly unlikely scenario. Meanwhile, the same result could easily be achieved by decreasing the AFD’s vote share in West Germany from 18% (2025) to 12%. This modest and realistic drop of 6 points would put the AFD just below 16%, while their record results in the East remain untouched.
Another development offers a reason to focus our attention on the West. As you might have heard, there’s a big debate about whether Germany should ban the AFD (there’s a procedure for that; I’ve covered the topic in length in this article). While a national ban currently seems unlikely, as some politicians have stated that they don’t want to ask the courts to consider such a procedure, the situation looks different in some Western States. Schleswig-Holstein is the first state to investigate a possible ban for the AFD’s state party. If such bans come into effect in Western states, the AFD’s performance in the East might not matter that much on the national level, as it barely made them pass the 5% national threshold to get into parliament.
We know that such procedures and developments could take a while. In the meantime, it might be wiser to focus on diminishing AFD support in the West rather than the East. I’ll leave you with an example from US politics: If you were a Democrat trying to defeat Trump in the Swing State of Georgia, would you focus on the countless of rural Trump strongholds to try and convince a minuscule percentage of voters in every county of the deeply conservative, Fox-News-watching electorate to vote for you to gain a few points statewide - or would you focus on one city, Atlanta, where much less work might yield you the same, if not better results?