Germany's Oil-Guzzling Gets AfD a Chance?
Saxony-Anhalt's AfD landslide follows Germany's nuclear exit, 98% oil and 95% gas import dependency, and a fourth year of industrial contraction, as neighbours from France to Sweden expand nuclear power.
On 6th September, the Alternative for Germany took 44.1% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, more than double the Christian Democrats' 17.1%, and won 39 of 83 seats in the state parliament. Turnout hit 77.8%, the highest since 1989 highlighting an almost desperate democratic interest in change. The CDU had governed the state for 24 years without interruption before this result. The AfD fell short of an outright majority, but its share of the vote was the largest any party has posted in a German state election since reunification. Pollsters found it winning 61% of blue-collar voters and over half of those aged 35 to 59, while CDU lost 20 percentage points from its 2021 tally.
Saxony-Anhalt vote share, 2021 to 2026 — Percentage of the vote won by each party in the state election — AfD: 20.8%,44.1%; CDU: 37.1%,17.1%; BSW, did not stand in 2021: ,5.3% — State election results. The AfD took 44.1% and 39 of 83 seats; the CDU, which had governed the state for 24 years, fell to 17.1%. The BSW did not contest the 2021 election. Turnout was 77.8%, the highest since 1989.
Saxony-Anhalt sits inside former East Germany which spent four decades under a one-party communist government before the Wall fell in 1989. It is likely that residents there retain memory of the depredation it wrought and voted to prevent an echo of history. They had already swung to the AfD once, in Thuringia's 2024 state election, and again in the 2025 federal vote. The AfD's Saxony-Anhalt platform ran on cutting immigration, leaving the euro's fiscal restrictions behind and reopening the coal and nuclear plants that Berlin spent two decades shutting down.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz took office in 2025 promising to loosen Germany's dependence on China and to stabilise an economy still absorbing the shock of losing cheap Russian gas. Germany's trade deficit with China widened to roughly €55 billion in the first half of 2026, up from €40 billion a year earlier. German exports to China fell over 12% to just under €37 billion, while Chinese imports into Germany rose 8.9% to €91.8 billion, widening the already large deficit. German manufacturers have kept moving production into China rather than out of it, continuing the path it was put on in Merkel’s times. BASF opened a €8.7 billion complex in Zhanjiang in March 2026, its largest single investment anywhere, while Volkswagen has committed further billions to its Chinese joint ventures through 2030. China overtook the United States as Germany's largest trading partner in 2025, the same year Merz took office pledging to cut the dependence.
Germany also shut its last three nuclear reactors, Isar 2, Neckarwestheim 2 and Emsland, in April 2023, completing a phase-out first ordered after Fukushima in 2011. The decision removed roughly 6% of the country's electricity generation at the same moment Russian pipeline gas was disappearing from the market. Nord Stream 1 had already been throttled through the summer of 2022 before flows stopped entirely that August, and the Nord Stream pipelines were damaged by underwater explosions the following month, closing off the cheap gas that had underwritten German industry for a generation. German households now pay some of the highest electricity prices in the European Union, despite the country's position as a leader in renewable generation.
Other countries are moving in the opposite direction. India runs three experimental fusion devices at its Institute for Plasma Research in Gujarat, holds a stake of about 9% in the ITER project under construction in France and set up a seven-member committee in January 2026 to plot a path toward fusion power, even as its own scientists put a working demonstration reactor around 2060. Their government has approved a Bharat Small Modular Reactor using nuclear fission, and a smaller SMR-55 for the Tarapur site in Maharashtra, targeted for completion by 2033, part of a wider plan for five indigenous small reactors built with private capital. India had idled its own nuclear ambitions for decades after Fukushima, and after its Nuclear Liability Act stalled foreign investment in the sector, before this recent push. Closer home, Macron's 2022 "nuclear rebirth" programme commits to six new EPR2 reactors at Penly and Gravelines, with a possible extension to 14.
France generated 67% of its electricity from nuclear power in 2024, using oil for barely 1% of it (7 TWh out of roughly 566 TWh). Germany, without a single reactor left, meets 98% of its oil consumption and 95% of its gas consumption through imports, a dependency France's nuclear fleet has let it largely avoid. Must be noted, though, that the Électricité de France pushed the first EPR2 unit's start back to 2038 in early 2025, with a final investment decision due in 2026, and the programme's estimated cost is now at €72.8 billion. An 11-country "nuclear alliance" with France and including Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Sweden, with Poland and Italy as observers, has also been lobbying Brussels since 2023 to get nuclear treated on equal footing with renewables in EU energy policy. They ask for it to cover new reactors, small modular reactors and life-extensions of ageing plants. Sweden has also felt the heat and reversed its own phase-out policy while planning new large reactors. Poland is building its first nuclear plant at Łubiatowo-Kopalino, with US firm Westinghouse. The Netherlands and Belgium have both walked back earlier phase-out commitments since the energy crisis.
Fossil fuel share of electricity, 2024 — Coal, oil and gas as a percentage of electricity generated — Sweden: 0.5%; France: about 6%; Germany: about 43% — 2024 generation data. Sweden drew 67% from nuclear and hydro and exported a net 33.4 TWh; France generated 67% from nuclear and used oil for about 1% of its power. Germany shut its last three reactors in April 2023 and imports 98% of its oil and 95% of its gas.
The AfD's platform on energy is built almost entirely around reversing the last two decades of German policy. It wants to reopen nuclear plants, favouring new reactors over Germany's current reliance on coal and gas, while treating new coal capacity as an acceptable bridge until that happens. It opposes further wind power expansion and wants to end subsidies for wind and solar, alongside repealing a number of the "green transition" laws underpinning the Energiewende. It rejects climate policy on principle, opposing "every policy and every tax related to alleged climate protection" and questioning the scientific consensus behind it. Distinctively, among the major parties, it supports repairing the damaged Nord Stream pipelines and restoring Russian gas imports, a position it shares with the smaller BSW.
Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, or the BSW, entered the Bundestag in the 2025 federal election and won 5.3% and 5 seats in the September 2026 Saxony-Anhalt election, where it now sits as a possible kingmaker because it hasn't ruled out cooperating with the AfD in the state legislature, unlike the SPD, Greens and Left.
The AfD's Saxony-Anhalt campaign focused on immigration and living costs rather than the party's positions on Russia or Germany's trade relationship with China. It has also softened some of its public messaging in recent years, even as its platform stays fixed on mass deportation and leaving the EU's core structures. Their manifesto calls for the immediate deportation of illegal migrants, an expansion of mass detention facilities, and what its Saxony-Anhalt candidate Ulrich Siegmund calls a "remigration offensive" aimed in part at Ukrainian refugees, on the argument that the region has exhausted its capacity to accept more. Its co-leader, Alice Weidel, is openly lesbian, in a long relationship with Sarah Bossard, a Sri Lankan-born film producer, with two adopted sons and a home in Switzerland. Her party’s own manifesto opposes same-sex marriage on grounds of protecting the traditional family structure, drawing a distinction between societal change and individual choice, much like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni who, while herself divorced, encourages more marriages and children within the traditional family unit. Weidel has led the AfD's Bundestag group since 2017 and its national co-chairmanship, alongside Tino Chrupalla, since 2022.
Saxony-Anhalt is a single state assembly, and even here the AfD's 39 seats leave it well short of forming a government on its own. Merz has repeatedly ruled out any cooperation with the AfD, a position sometimes called Germany's political firewall, and he restated it again after the result. BSW seems to be weighing its choices. The result only reflects that 44.1% of the state's voters were willing to hand the AfD a mandate for change, and if their manifesto promises seem unlike their voters’ sociopolitical choices thus far, the voters are now willing to accept the differences in hopes for better.
Germany imports roughly 67% of the energy it consumes and that dependency is most obvious in oil, where 98% of its mineral oil consumption comes from abroad, with 84 million tonnes of crude imported in 2024 alone. Gas import dependency sits at around 95%, with LNG terminals built since 2022 now supplying 10.3% of consumption, up from 8% the year before, in place of the Russian pipeline gas the country lost.
Saxony-Anhalt also voted against the backdrop of a fourth consecutive year of German industrial contraction. Production fell by roughly 2% over 2025, and about 120,000 industrial jobs will be eliminated by the end of this month, including 49,000 in the automotive sector at firms such as Volkswagen, Porsche and Thyssenkrupp's steel division.
As AfD seeks to reverse the ineffective “green transition” that has allowed for more imports, Sweden generated just 0.5% of its electricity from coal, oil and gas combined in 2024, drawing 67% instead from nuclear and hydro, and it exported a net 33.4 TWh of power that year. Germany, by contrast, still meets 98% of its oil consumption and 95% of its gas consumption through imports, having shut its last reactor in 2023 rather than build on the nuclear base Sweden kept and expanded.
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania votes on 20th September, and polling there has put the AfD at 36%, at more than double its 16.7% result in the state's last election in 2021.