Germany's right-wing AfD won a landslide victory in a key regional election in the ex-communist east, according to exit polls, but it remains unclear whether it can win an absolute majority to govern. AFP via Getty Images See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google Alternative für Deutschland’s electoral victory this weekend in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt is serving as a sharp wake-up call for the country’s ruling parties.
It should do the same for Democrats in America.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz acknowledged that the win — with the anti-immigrant, pro-Russia AfD taking a plurality, 44%, of votes — had shaken his party “to its very foundations.”
The lesson: Ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open door to mass immigration had a major, long-lasting impact on the country, and that has prompted consequences for pols that backed or failed to sufficiently oppose it.
Recall that in 2015, Merkel admitted around 1 million migrants, including significant numbers from the Middle East and North Africa, on humanitarian grounds.
Whatever one thinks of the morality of that policy, the fallout has been disastrous.
Witness the pointless murder this summer of Marius Dick, allegedly by an Afghan refugee — just one of many such highly publicized crimes involving immigrants.
Or the fact that 2025 data show, per one analysis, that Algerians in Germany are 26 times as likely to commit serious violent crime as the average German.
Or the fact that a rape network similar to the ones that have wreaked havoc in the United Kingdom may be emerging in Nuremberg, driven by migrant influxes.
Voters in Saxony-Anhalt also resent the competition from cheap immigrant labor.
Yet left-leaning elites simply refuse to admit any potential downsides to mass immigration from nations with fundamentally different values and cultural norms.
That’s true of America’s left as well: On the first day of President Joe Biden’s term, he similarly opened the immigration floodgates on “humanitarian” grounds.
The catastrophe he caused is still unfolding: Every time a border-jumper rapes, robs, steals, or kills, Biden and other Dems share some blame.
And there’s blowback: a collapse of support for Democrats on immigration, which fueled Donald Trump’s 2024 victory.
It’s another reminder that there’s a price to pay when pols deny the profound risks of mass migration and instead enable it: Voters fight back at the ballot box.
