Tens of thousands protest against AfD across Germany as far-right party surges

Twenty thousand people moved through the streets of Düsseldorf on a September weekend, carrying signs and marching under a single phrase: "Not a Step Back." They came to say no to the Alternative for Germany, the far-right AfD party, and to the rhetoric of hate that had begun to feel normal in their country. The weather was good. Families brought children. A group calling themselves the Grandmas Against the Right held a poster that read, simply, "The right is only for knitting." There were no counter-demonstrations. The march was peaceful.

Düsseldorf was not alone. In Berlin, police counted eighteen thousand people converging on the town hall—organizers said thirty-two thousand came. Munich saw twelve thousand gather. Smaller cities held their own: two thousand in Mainz, fifteen hundred in Saarbrücken, eleven hundred in Magdeburg. Leipzig and other towns joined in. Across Germany, in a coordinated push, citizens moved into the streets with a unified message: they wanted their country back from the far-right surge.

What had triggered this mobilization was concrete and recent. On September 6, the AfD had won nearly forty-four percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt's state election—the largest share by far, though short of an absolute majority. The result sent a shock through German politics and civil society alike. The party that had been treated as a pariah by the country's major political forces had just demonstrated it could win decisively in a state election. The firewall strategy—the agreement among mainstream parties to isolate the AfD and prevent it from gaining power—suddenly looked fragile.

The protests carried a secondary demand: that Germany's Constitutional Court review whether the AfD should be banned as a far-right extremist party. This was not a casual call. Eva Umlauf, a Holocaust survivor and president of the International Auschwitz Committee, had written an open letter to Hendrik Wüst, the CDU premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, urging him to move forward with a ban motion. She was ninety-three years old. She had been brought to Auschwitz in her mother's arms at age two. "At some point, and it is not so far away now, the last of us survivors will be gone," she wrote. "Therefore we are passing on the burden that we have carried for a lifetime." She reminded Wüst that the first state government led by Hitler's NSDAP had come to power in Anhalt in 1932. Eight months later, Hitler became chancellor. "It was possible, because others believed that they could contain him. And because many looked the way. Because they thought it would pass. The Holocaust did not start with gas chambers, it began with apathy."

Meanwhile, the political establishment was fracturing under pressure. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, leading the center-right CDU, faced growing criticism for the sluggish pace of promised reforms and for his apparent inability to contain the AfD's rise. In the Bundestag, Merz had called the AfD's "remigration" policy—a plan to remove large numbers of people from Germany based on ethnicity and heritage—"nothing other than ethnic cleansing by skin color and heritage." The AfD responded by seeking to prosecute him for defamation, a move so unusual that it underscored how far the political temperature had risen. Markus Söder, leader of the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the CSU, ruled out any internal move to remove Merz, urging the center-right alliance not to let the AfD "drive a wedge between us now."

Former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had led Germany for sixteen years, broke her usual silence to warn that truth and lies were increasingly being blurred, including by people in power. She also acknowledged that some of her own decisions during her time as chancellor had helped fuel support for the AfD—a rare admission of complicity in the conditions that had created the party's opening.

International observers were watching closely, and not all were convinced that Germany's strategy would work. Giorgia Meloni, Italy's prime minister and leader of the right-wing Brothers of Italy party, told an Italian newspaper that the firewall approach was failing. "As we can see, this is a strategy that does not work," she said. She argued that listening to the concerns of voters—on immigration, identity, and what she called the "danger of Islamization"—was more effective than simply erecting barriers against far-right parties. The comment was pointed: Meloni was suggesting that Germany's mainstream parties were ignoring legitimate grievances, and that this refusal to engage was only strengthening the AfD.

The streets, at least, were still open. The protests showed that civil society had not surrendered. But the question hanging over Germany was whether marches and calls for bans could slow a party that had just won forty-four percent of a state's vote. The firewall was under strain. The next state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania was scheduled for September 20, and the AfD was polling three points ahead.