The Real Reason Germany Voted AfD (America Already Did It)

Everyone called Germany's 43.8% AfD result a far-right immigration earthquake. The people who studied the vote say it was cost of living, and it already happened in America. Petra in Halle and Mike near Youngstown made the same choice for the same reason.

It's 6:40 in the evening on the sixth of September, and Petra is standing in a school gymnasium in Halle, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, filling out a ballot behind a cardboard privacy screen that's seen thirty years of these. She's forty-four, works in logistics, and the number that's been eating at her for two years isn't abstract. It's the heating bill that landed in her mailbox last winter, nearly double what it was before the gas crisis, on a salary that hasn't kept pace.

Eighteen months earlier and four thousand miles away, Mike is standing in the exact same posture in a firehouse-turned-polling-place outside Youngstown, Ohio, filling out his own ballot, thinking about the same kind of number: what a cart of groceries cost him in 2021 versus what it costs him now, and how his paycheck never seemed to catch up to the gap. Neither of them has met the other. Neither speaks the other's language. And if you handed each of them a printout of the other's politics, they'd probably recognize almost nothing in it. But they made the exact same decision, for the exact same reason, on two different continents: they voted against whoever was in charge when the prices went up.

I'm Justin, and I've lived in Germany for over twelve years. This channel exists to find the costs nobody puts on a postcard, including, apparently, the ones that show up in an election result instead of a grocery receipt. Today's question isn't whether Germany is turning into something scary, which is the version of this story that gets the most clicks. It's a narrower, more useful one: what specific costs are actually driving German voters to upend their own political map, how closely does that match what already happened in the US, and does knowing the mechanism tell you anything about where either country goes next.

Why the "far-right earthquake" story is wrong

The popular version of this story, the one running across American cable news for the past week, is that Germany just had another far-right earthquake driven purely by immigration panic, and that it's a uniquely dark, uniquely German phenomenon. The real version, according to the people actually studying the vote on the ground, is both less sensational and more useful: post-election analysis out of Saxony-Anhalt points squarely at cost-of-living frustration, not migration, as the dominant driver, rising energy bills, persistent inflation, and two years of a shrinking economy, with immigration riding alongside as a real but secondary issue rather than the engine underneath it.

To be fair to the people who think the immigration angle deserves more weight, and to those who think comparing any of this to America oversimplifies something more serious: they have real points. The party benefiting from this anger, the AfD, campaigned in Saxony-Anhalt on what amounted to a mass deportation and "remigration" push targeting undocumented migrants. That's not incidental to the platform, and pretending cost of living is the whole story would be its own kind of dishonesty. It's also true that Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Verfassungsschutz, has classified the AfD nationally as a suspected right-wing extremist organization and several of its state chapters as confirmed extremist groups, a legal classification still being fought out in German courts, a categorically different situation than anything attached to a mainstream American party. Flattening a German protest voter and an American protest voter into the same box erases real, important differences in what each party actually is. What doesn't get erased is the economic mechanism sitting underneath both results.

The number that triggered it

Start with the number that actually triggered this. In February 2025, Germany held a snap federal election after its three-party coalition, the Social Democrats, Greens, and Free Democrats, nicknamed the Ampelkoalition for the red, yellow, and green of the parties involved, collapsed months early over budget infighting. The AfD roughly doubled its vote share overnight, to 20.8 percent, becoming the second-largest party in the Bundestag, the national parliament, behind only the CDU's 28.6 percent. Turnout hit 82.5 percent, the highest in thirty-five years. Eighty-three percent of voters told pollsters they were worried about the direction of the country, and only fourteen percent approved of the government they'd just voted out. That's not a fringe protest. That's most of the country registering the same complaint at once.

It started with gas

The complaint had a very specific shape, and it started with gas. Before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Germany got roughly fifty-five percent of its natural gas from Russian pipelines, a dependency built up over decades on the assumption that cheap, reliable Russian energy was a permanent feature of German industrial life. When that pipeline gas disappeared, German energy prices spiked so hard that a single chemical company, BASF, absorbed an extra 3.2 billion euros in energy costs in 2022 alone, and ordinary households watched heating bills, Petra's among them, jump by anywhere from thirty to eighty percent depending on their contract and region. National inflation, which had sat comfortably under two percent for most of the previous decade, hit 6.9 percent for the year, a level most working Germans under fifty had never personally experienced.

That energy shock didn't stay contained to heating bills, it dragged the entire economy down with it. Germany's economy shrank for two consecutive years, roughly half a percent each in 2023 and 2024, making it at one point the worst-performing major economy in the G7, a stunning reversal for a country long held up as Europe's industrial engine. Manufacturing, the sector that built modern German prosperity, got hit hardest, since it's exactly the kind of energy-intensive work that got expensive fastest.

The headline inflation number has since come back down, to roughly 2.7 to 2.8 percent as of the middle of this year, close to the European Central Bank's target. If you were only reading the official statistics, you'd expect the anger to have cooled off along with it. It hasn't, and the reason is one of the most consistent findings in the economics of public opinion: people don't feel the rate of inflation, they feel the level of prices, and the level never goes back down just because the rate of increase slows. Petra's heating bill isn't dropping back toward 2021 levels, it's just not climbing quite as fast anymore, which turns out to be cold comfort at the end of the month.

The East-West divide nobody prices in

Layer the east-west economic divide on top of that gap and you get something even more combustible. Median household wealth in the former East is still roughly a quarter of what it is in the West, decades after reunification, and eastern voters carry a specific, well-documented sense of having done everything asked of them economically and still ending up structurally behind. That's the backdrop the AfD is campaigning against in states like Saxony-Anhalt, and it means the same national inflation number lands very differently on a household in Halle than on one in Munich. (We broke that wealth gap down in detail in the East vs West Germany divide.)

Saxony-Anhalt: how the AfD hit 43.8%

All of that converged on September 6th, when Saxony-Anhalt held elections for its state parliament, the Landtag, and the result was the most dramatic yet: the AfD won 43.8 percent of the vote, more than double the second-place CDU's 17.2 percent, a result the AfD's own lead candidate described as making history. Because Germany's mainstream parties maintain a strict political firewall, the Brandmauer, against forming coalitions with the AfD, winning the most votes in a state doesn't automatically mean winning the government. The remaining parties, whatever their other differences, typically band together specifically to keep the AfD out of power, a dynamic already shaping the coalition talks underway in Saxony-Anhalt. Post-election analysis pointed to the same driver as the national election eighteen months earlier: cost-of-living issues, not migration, as the primary force behind the swing.

The second act: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern

This isn't a one-state story that's already finished, either. On September 20th, just two weeks after Saxony-Anhalt, the neighboring state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern holds its own election, and as of the most recent polling the AfD is sitting at roughly 36 percent against the incumbent Social Democrats' 29 percent. In that same state's 2021 election, the numbers were almost exactly reversed, the SPD won with 39.6 percent to the AfD's 16.7. That's a swing of roughly twenty points in under five years.

And the AfD isn't even the only new insurgent option this anger has produced. In 2024, a breakaway faction of the socialist Left party formed an entirely new vehicle, the Alliance for Sahra Wagenknecht, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, built around economic populism from the opposite end of the spectrum: skepticism of NATO and EU institutions paired with explicitly left-wing demands on wages, pensions, and energy prices. It's polling at only around four percent, nowhere near the AfD's scale, but its very existence is the tell. The same cost-of-living pressure fueling the right-wing surge also cracked off a brand-new left-wing party within a single electoral cycle, over largely the same grievances. When the pressure is big enough, it doesn't just move votes between existing options, it manufactures new ones on both ends at once.

Flip the map: America's 2024 vote

Now flip the map, and go back to Mike's polling place outside Youngstown in November 2024. AP VoteCast, one of the largest voter surveys ever conducted for a US election, found that roughly four in ten American voters named the economy and jobs as the single most important problem facing the country, more than any other issue on the ballot, including immigration. Voters gave Donald Trump a clear edge over Kamala Harris on which candidate they trusted to handle it, and that edge on the economy is widely credited, by pollsters across the political spectrum, as the single biggest factor separating that election from the one four years earlier.

The specific prices behind that anger sound familiar after the German side. Cumulative inflation in the US from early 2021 through the 2024 election ran to roughly twenty percent, meaning a basket of goods that cost a hundred dollars at the start of that stretch cost close to a hundred and twenty by the time voters went to the polls. Grocery prices, gas, and rent all climbed well ahead of average wage growth, and eggs in particular became something close to a national meme, doubling and in some markets tripling during a bird-flu-driven shortage. None of that produced a single dramatic headline number the way Germany's 6.9 percent did, American inflation peaked lower, around nine percent in mid-2022, but the accumulated, multi-year squeeze carried the same political weight as one sharp German energy shock.

And the American story didn't stop at the 2024 result. The same affordability issue that carried Trump and Republicans into office had, within about a year, started working against them instead. Multiple outlets across the political spectrum reported by late 2025 that the very issue which boosted Republicans in 2024 was actively deflating their support in 2025, as prices remained stubbornly high under the new administration and voters applied the identical logic in reverse: whoever's in charge when the bill arrives owns the bill. By the time the 2026 midterms came into view, Democratic strategists were explicitly building messaging around Trump's "affordability crisis," the same phrase, aimed at the opposite party, less than two years apart.

Same fuel, different container

That reversal is the clearest evidence that this isn't a left-versus-right story at all. It's a structural one, and the structure of each country's political system just determines what shape the protest vote takes. Germany runs proportional representation, so a party can win over forty percent of the vote in one state and it shows up as exactly that: a distinct, named party with real seats, the way the AfD's 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt does. The US runs a winner-take-all, two-party system, so the identical protest energy doesn't spin off a new party, it gets absorbed into whichever of the two existing parties currently holds power or wants it. Same fuel. Differently shaped container.

History rhymes

If you want the historical version instead of just the current one, it's been showing up for over a century on both sides of the Atlantic. Weimar Germany's hyperinflation in the early 1920s helped destabilize the political center for a full generation, the most extreme version of this mechanism on record. The stagflation of the 1970s in the US, inflation running past thirteen percent by 1979, reshaped American politics enough to help elect a president the following year who ran explicitly against the economic establishment. Britain's 2016 vote to leave the EU is remembered abroad almost entirely as an immigration story, but plenty of post-referendum research pointed to stagnant wages and a sense of being economically left behind in post-industrial regions as just as important a current underneath it. It's not that inflation always produces the same outcome. It's that inflation reliably produces instability for whoever's currently holding power, and history is fairly patient about eventually cashing that check.

The 2029 window (the good news)

Here's the part that almost never makes it into the international coverage, and it's a strange kind of good news. Germany's next national election isn't until 2029, which economists and political analysts studying the AfD's rise keep pointing to as a genuine window rather than a countdown to something inevitable. The argument, backed by the voting pattern itself, is that this is fundamentally an economic-performance problem with an economic-performance solution, not a permanent ideological realignment. Voters didn't fall in love with a platform. They ran out of patience with a bill, and the data so far suggests the bill, not the platform, is still the thing actually moving the number.

Back to Petra and Mike

So, back to that gymnasium in Halle and that firehouse outside Youngstown. Petra's ballot became one vote inside that 43.8 percent, but Petra herself would probably tell you she wasn't voting for history, she was voting because her heating bill nearly doubled and nobody currently in office had made that stop. Mike's ballot became one vote inside that four-in-ten who told AP VoteCast the economy was the country's biggest problem, and less than two years later, by his own account, he's watching prices that still haven't come down and wondering whether the people he voted for are about to get handed the exact same verdict he handed the last administration. Neither of them was voting on a spreadsheet. But the spreadsheet, it turns out, explains almost everything about what they both did that day.

What to actually do with all of this

1. When you see a dramatic election result covered as a sudden ideological shift, check the inflation and growth numbers from the two years before it. In both the German and American cases, the economic story was sitting in plain sight well before the vote.

2. Don't assume a falling inflation rate means falling anger. The rate can normalize while the price level, and the resentment attached to it, stays exactly where it landed.

3. If you're reading a European election from the US, resist mapping it onto American party labels one-for-one. The economic mechanism travels well, but the specific parties, their histories, and their more extreme positions don't automatically translate.

4. To predict where any of this goes next, watch the cost-of-living numbers, not the polling on personalities. On both continents, that's been the more reliable leading indicator so far.

Want to see how the two countries stack up for your own situation? Our free US vs Germany cost-of-living calculator lets you pick any two cities and compare rent, groceries, healthcare, transport, utilities, and how much of your salary you actually take home on each side.

The bottom line

Two elections, two continents, two ballots that look nothing alike on paper, and underneath both of them the same quiet arithmetic: prices went up, patience ran out, and the people in charge when it happened got handed the bill. That's the pattern connecting a gymnasium in Halle to a firehouse outside Youngstown, and it's exactly the kind of cost nobody puts on a postcard.

Disclosure: the My Expat Taxes link in this article is an affiliate link. If you sign up through it, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you, which helps support the channel. This article is general information, not tax, financial, or political advice, and it does not endorse any party or candidate. Election figures and economic data are drawn from public sources (including Destatis, AP VoteCast, and post-election reporting) and vary by source and revision.