In the recent elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) achieved 43.8% of the votes, more than doubling its results from 2021, while the Christian Democrats who had governed for more than 20 years saw their vote share reduced to approximately 17.2%. The AfD led across all voter and age groups, including the youngest, in a context of participation that increased by 17.5 percentage points, rising from 60.3% to 77.8%.
The article references the essay by Wolfgang Münchau, a journalist specializing in European economics and director of Eurointelligence, titled "Kaput: The End of the German Miracle." Münchau argues that the German economic model, built in the post-war period and based on external surpluses, cheap energy, rigid fiscal discipline, and an inability to keep pace with global technological transformation, has exhausted itself and lies at the root of the structural crisis affecting the European Union.
Germany was not only the strongest economy in the European Union, but also the normative reference for European economic governance for decades. The article argues that Europe adopted the German model without the external conditions that made it viable, contributing to persistent imbalances between center and periphery. The obsession with fiscal balance led to the erosion of physical, digital, and energy infrastructure, and Europe allowed itself to be overtaken technologically by the United States and China, as documented in the Letta and Draghi reports of 2024.
The article concludes that the rise of the AfD cannot be interpreted solely as an ideological phenomenon, but as the social expression of a deep economic and political crisis whose responsibilities are associated with the parties and political forces that have led Europe in recent decades, revealing growing inability to respond to structural transformations. The European problem, according to the article, is not only not to look at the world as it is, but above all to continue looking at the world as it was.
