The Kremlin does not need the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) to govern to achieve the victory it seeks in Germany. It needs only the party’s electoral strength to trap exhausted incumbents in increasingly brittle exclusion coalitions that struggle to sustain rearmament, support for Ukraine, and Germany’s long-term security commitments.
In September, Germany’s electoral battlefield may prove to be one of Russia’s least expensive fronts for challenging NATO. Because Europe’s defense build-up runs through German budgets, industry, and political will, a paralyzed Berlin would allow the Kremlin to weaken the cohesion and military capacity of NATO’s European pillar without deploying a single soldier.
A paralyzed Berlin would allow the Kremlin to weaken the cohesion and military capacity of NATO’s European pillar without deploying a single soldier
Domestic Strains, Foreign Leverage
Saxony-Anhalt votes first, on September 6, with the AfD polling at 41 percent, roughly 17 points ahead of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Berlin follows on September 20, where the party is running either first or second, depending on the poll. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern votes the same day, with the AfD at 36 percent.
Russia’s strategic opportunity lies in Germany’s political and economic vulnerabilities, which are largely domestic in origin and predate the current campaign. Cheap Russian gas underpinned the German industrial model for decades. That dependence was a German choice. Successive governments deepened it through the Nord Stream pipelines, treating commercial integration as a security strategy rather than a potential vulnerability the Kremlin might someday choose to leverage.
The nuclear phase-out, completed in April 2023, removed an alternative just as gas supply became a liability. The war and the sanctions regime severed the arrangement, and the largest economy in Europe contracted in both 2023 and 2024. Migration compounded the strain. Repeated failures to control irregular entry handed the AfD its most reliable issue. Disputes over integration, national identity, and the pace of social change gave it a second. Coalition fatigue completed the picture, first under Olaf Scholz and now under Merz, with roughly four in five Germans dissatisfied with the government’s record. Russian operations did not author German discontent. Each grievance exploited by the AfD carries its own internal political logic, even as Moscow clearly recognizes the opening and works to widen it.
Russian operations did not author German discontent. Each grievance exploited by the AfD carries its own internal political logic, even as Moscow clearly recognizes the opening and works to widen it
Still, German authorities have documented sustained election interference. The Foreign Office summoned Russia’s ambassador in December 2025, stating that the GRU-linked Storm-1516 operation had sought to influence and destabilize the February 2025 federal election. Researchers identified more than 700 fake social media accounts in that campaign’s final week, spreading fabricated scandals about Friedrich Merz and then vice-chancellor and Green chancellor candidate Robert Habeck.
An unattributed attack has also marked the campaign. Last week, a bus driver at Leipzig/Halle airport knocked an explosive-laden drone out of the air beside a Ukrainian Antonov cargo aircraft. Federal prosecutors described the incident as a serious attack on Germany’s external and internal security.
Investigators suspect Russian hybrid warfare, though Moscow denies involvement and no attribution has been proven. The party affinity is separately documented: the AfD opposes arms deliveries to Kyiv, and German prosecutors have investigated AfD-linked figures over alleged payments from the pro-Russian Voice of Europe network.
The Firewall’s Impossible Arithmetic
Eastern Germany supplies the structural tinder. Three decades after reunification, the region combines weaker wages, demographic decline, and thinner party organizations with a political memory less anchored in Atlanticism. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD’s lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund challenges incumbent premier Sven Schulze, whose CDU has fallen to roughly 24 percent.
But the Kremlin’s deeper return on investment lies in the arithmetic the party’s strength imposes on everyone else. Every point the AfD gains shrinks the space in which pro-Ukraine majorities can form, regardless of what voters intended. The mechanism is already visible at federal level. Merz governs through a grand coalition with the Social Democrats that commands little enthusiasm. Nationally, the AfD polls near 27 percent, now 8 points ahead of the CDU.
That pressure is now surfacing inside the CDU itself. In July, Saxony’s CDU premier Michael Kretschmer called for ending the Brandmauer, the firewall barring cooperation with the AfD. Merz rebuffed him, insisting that the far right remains the CDU’s main opponent. Both men respond rationally to an impossible strategic position: upholding the firewall forces the CDU into coalitions with a weakened left, producing lowest-common-denominator governments that feed the very disillusion on which the AfD capitalizes. Abandoning it, meanwhile, would normalize and legitimize a party the domestic intelligence service assesses as extremist while handing Moscow an important political victory.
Incumbents beyond the CDU face the same squeeze. In Schwerin, Manuela Schwesig’s Social Democrats trail the AfD by ten points, while in the capital, polls project no straightforward governing majority.
Some German political commentators argue that bringing the AfD into government would cure what exclusion inflames. The challenges of actually governing may ultimately weaken the party. Responsibility, in this view, demystifies: populists forced to govern lose the luxury of permanent protest. The AfD’s grievance politics would be forced to transform.
But Austria tested that proposition and exposed its limits. The Freedom Party entered coalition in 2017, collapsed in the Ibiza scandal two years later, and fell to 16 percent at the following election. Demystification worked, briefly. But recovery took just five years. The party won the 2024 national election outright and now dominates polling from opposition. From Moscow’s vantage point, the wager is safer still because a failed AfD administration would more likely deliver dysfunction and a discredited state than a rehabilitated center.
Each path tends to serve the Kremlin’s minimal objective: a Germany governed by fragile coalitions consumed by their own political survival. A single drone, a network of fake accounts, and recruited proxy saboteurs used to exploit Germany’s AfD crisis represent a marginal expenditure against any NATO state’s defense budget.
Old Method, New Target
Russia’s method has a lineage. During the early 1980s, Soviet active measures backed West German opposition to the deployment of Pershing II missiles. The campaign influenced public debate and shifted the SPD but not the Bundestag. Deployment proceeded under Helmut Kohl because two large blocs could still form stable governments unaided. That absorptive capacity has since eroded.
Today’s variant requires neither protest marches nor funded fronts. It needs only an electorate inclined to punish incumbents, a fragmented parliament where exclusion consumes the majority, and information channels Moscow can flood at negligible cost. The Kremlin has moved from subsidizing dissent to arbitraging democratic fatigue.
September’s votes carry alliance-wide weight because Berlin has become the load-bearing structure of European defense. The 2026 defense budget allocates roughly $125 billion to the military, combining about $95 billion from the core budget with additional spending financed through the $115 billion Zeitenwende Sondervermögen (special fund). Government planning charts a path toward 3.5 percent of GDP for defense by 2029, with the core budget projected to reach $177 billion by 2028. Merz has declared his intention to build the Bundeswehr into Europe’s strongest conventional army.
The timetable, however, sharpens political exposure. The special fund will be exhausted by the end of 2027, leaving the steepest planned increases in the future—between 2028 and 2030, exactly when the next federal election will redistribute power. German rearmament is a promise made by this parliament that only the next one can keep.
Because it defers the steepest funding increases to the future, German rearmament is a promise made by this parliament that only the next one can keep
Electoral arithmetic has constrained that promise once already. In March 2025, Merz secured a constitutional exemption allowing defense spending to bypass the debt brake only by pushing the measure through the outgoing Bundestag. The incoming chamber contained an AfD and Left Party minority large enough to block constitutional amendments. The legal foundation of German rearmament thus rests on a maneuver executed days before the electoral door closed. Future adjustments are likely to face an even harder chamber.
The implications go beyond Germany. Ukraine’s war effort now depends on this trajectory. Following Washington’s reduction in military assistance, Germany became Kyiv’s largest military donor, with support of around 13.2 billion euros planned for 2026, including Patriot air defense systems, artillery, and drones.
Germany and NATO Burden-Sharing
German industry anchors the wider European effort through Rheinmetall‘s expanding ammunition plants and the F-35 procurement sustaining NATO’s nuclear mission. Alliance planning also treats the country as the rear-area hub through which reinforcements would flow to the eastern flank in a crisis.
An AfD-led government in Saxony-Anhalt would therefore matter beyond state politics. It would hold votes in the Bundesrat, extend patronage over administration and police, and normalize the party before the 2029 federal contest. More importantly, the Zeitenwende’s multi-year contracts require stable majorities across multiple electoral cycles. The AfD rejects that strategic rearmament consensus outright.
Germany’s build-up has become the core of NATO’s burden-sharing bargain. At the 2025 Hague summit, allies pledged five percent of GDP for defense and related infrastructure, a target designed to let Washington pivot toward the Indo-Pacific. The European pillar Washington demands therefore runs through German fiscal and political choices. Poland and the Baltic states spend heavily but lack Germany’s industrial depth and financial capacity. France carries nuclear weight yet faces its own fiscal constraints and a strong Rassemblement National ahead of 2027.
Slovakia under Robert Fico already obstructs the common line on Russia, and Andrej Babiš campaigned in Czechia against financing the ammunition initiative for Ukraine before returning to office. Hungary, on the other hand, demonstrates that the accommodationist advance across the alliance remains contestable. Péter Magyar’s landslide defeat of Viktor Orbán in April removed the Kremlin’s most reliable veto player. Yet Hungary was an obstacle within a project, while Germany is the project’s foundation. A Berlin unable to fund, arm, and decide could end it.
The pattern does not stop at Europe’s edge. Washington demands German rearmament while prominent American voices attack the containment strategy protecting it. Vice President JD Vance used the 2025 Munich Security Conference to denounce European firewalls against parties like the AfD, and Elon Musk endorsed the party outright before the federal election. The patron of European burden-sharing thus lends rhetorical cover to the movement most likely to sink it. Moscow collects the dividend of a division it did not have to create.
The patron of European burden-sharing, Washington, thus lends rhetorical cover to the movement most likely to sink it. Moscow collects the dividend of a division it did not have to create.
Democracy Misfires
Germany’s constitutional order was designed for precisely this threat, and its instruments are failing the test. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution designated the AfD a confirmed right-wing extremist organization in May 2025. It now faces a public more willing to support the AfD than any other party.
In February this year, the Cologne Administrative Court granted the party an injunction suspending that designation pending final judgment, finding the conditions for the classification unmet. AfD leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla celebrated a victory for democratic fairness, timed months before the eastern elections.
The legal establishment then pushed in the opposite direction. In June, the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte published an expert opinion concluding that the AfD violates the Basic Law’s human dignity and democracy principles. By early August, more than 1,000 jurists had signed an open letter demanding ban proceedings at Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court.
However, each trajectory feeds the Kremlin’s narrative machine. A ban application would let Moscow’s outlets present Germany as a managed democracy silencing its largest opposition party. A failed or abandoned application would certify the AfD as constitutionally sound, collapsing the rationale for exclusion. The February injunction reveals a third cost. Courts may disarm the intelligence services mid-campaign, leaving the state’s assessment discredited and the party emboldened.
Germany’s democracy assumed that enemies of the constitution would remain minorities. The doctrine offers no answer to an extremist-designated party approaching pluralities because banning a movement of ten million voters carries risks the Basic Law’s drafters never priced. Soviet doctrine has a name for the intended version of this outcome: reflexive control. It seeks to shape an adversary’s information environment so that it voluntarily selects the course the initiator prefers. Germany’s predicament resembles the objective more than the technique.
No theorist engineered it. The intelligence designation, the injunction against it, the jurists’ letter, and the firewall each represent the constitutional order defending itself. Each also generates material for the claim that German democracy is rigged, which the AfD and Russian outlets amplify in parallel and to great rhetorical effect. The constitutional order’s very defense mechanisms have become part of the political battlefield.
The Unguarded Frontier
NATO’s defense planning maps the Suwałki Gap, the Baltic approaches, and the High North. Yet the alliance’s most penetrable front appears on none of the maps because it is political and electoral rather than geographical. Russia has demonstrated that weakening the alliance’s center of gravity requires no missiles, only patience while democratic attrition does the work. No alliance strategy paper accounts for a member state whose capacity to rearm dissolves through its own legitimate electoral process.
Strategic effect does not require strategic authorship. Whether Russian influence operations add two points to the party’s total or none at all, the outcome Moscow seeks may arrive either way. Yet projections warrant caution. Grand coalitions may again assemble majorities in all three contests. German public support for Ukraine has proven more resilient than pessimists expected, and the Merz government has so far protected its defense trajectory through each budget round.
Three September indicators should show how far the dynamic has advanced. The first is whether the AfD converts its plurality in Magdeburg into an absolute majority of seats, which depends on how many small parties fall below the five percent threshold. The second is whether any CDU state association defies the national line during government formation, since a single defection would end the firewall as a credible commitment. And the third is how long the capital needs to form any government, because protracted paralysis in Berlin would itself validate the ungovernability charge.
The structural direction appears to point one way. The most plausible outcome is that September’s contest leaves German incumbents weaker, coalition-building harder, and the firewall more fragile and expensive to maintain. The 2029 federal election may prove the decisive iteration of the same test, with the AfD entering from a higher base.
The asymmetry favors Moscow. Russia loses little by waiting for democratic fragmentation to deepen, while Germany and its allies must sustain consensus across successive cycles. The defenders of the Zeitenwende must prevail repeatedly; Moscow may need to succeed only once.
NATO has spent decades fortifying the frontiers it can see. Germany’s September test will offer an early indication of whether its political frontier proves equally resilient. If Germany’s political center proves unable to sustain rearmament over time, NATO’s burden-sharing strategy may face constraints that no amount of military planning can solve.
If Germany’s political center proves unable to sustain rearmament over time, NATO’s burden-sharing strategy may face constraints that no amount of military planning can solve
