While the AfD\u2019s rise is a nationwide phenomenon, Saxony-Anhalt cannot be explained without the party\u2019s candidate for minister-president, the 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund, and his campaign style, which increasingly resembles that of the man Germany\u2019s establishment celebrated for removing Orb\u00e1n.<\/p>\n
Magyar did not defeat Fidesz by building a conventional ideological opposition bloc. Tisza brought together former opposition voters, disillusioned Fidesz supporters, previously inactive voters and conservatives for whom replacing the incumbent system became more important than traditional party identity.<\/p>\n
Magyar himself hardly fits a neat liberal-versus-right-wing comparison: he has maintained<\/a> Hungary\u2019s restrictive position on illegal migration and migrant relocation, and in June warned<\/a> Western European politicians that excluding insurgent parties behind political \u2018firewalls\u2019 only makes them stronger. \u2018In many countries, the political, media and economic elite protects its own position,\u2019 he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, instead of addressing voters\u2019 fears and problems.<\/p>\n From B\u00fcrgerdialog to \u2018Absolute Cinema\u2019<\/p>\n His campaign was built around physical presence. Researchers counted 207 Tisza events<\/a> between November 2025 and the April election, with Magyar deliberately concentrating on rural constituencies and Fidesz territory rather than traditionally opposition-aligned Budapest. Direct engagement with voters gave Magyar a national platform outside the Fidesz media environment and became one of his most important communication tools for reaching the rural electorate.<\/p>\n Besides his physical presence, Magyar used, and still uses, social media extraordinarily effectively, generating overwhelming engagement. Between 1 and 11 April, the final ten days before the vote, he generated 6.87 million Facebook interactions against Orb\u00e1n\u2019s 4.76 million, despite posting less frequently. He more than doubled<\/a> Orb\u00e1n\u2019s number of shares, 419,000 to 196,000.<\/p>\n Siegmund is doing much the same in Saxony-Anhalt: B\u00fcrgerdialog meetings<\/a>, small-town appearances, long sessions of selfies and autographs, and enormous social-media reach. Reuters described the AfD in May as deliberately going local to woo voters ignored by mainstream politics. The strategy reached another level on Sunday in Quedlinburg, where almost 5,000 people attended an AfD campaign event built around Simson motorcycles, an instantly recognizable symbol of East German popular culture. Siegmund led the motorcade himself.<\/p>\n It was politics designed to be experienced before it was explained: motorcycles, families, queues, selfies and regional identity, all immediately turned into digital content. Reuters noted that AfD support among roughly 18-to-34-year-olds in Saxony-Anhalt reached around 40 per cent in the 2025 federal election, up from about a quarter in 2021.<\/p>\n Magyar carried the same visual politics into government. After taking office, he personally began removing the barriers<\/a> around the Carmelite Monastery, Orb\u00e1n\u2019s former government headquarters, on camera. The policy message\u2014opening government after 16 years of Fidesz\u2014was turned into a physical image of the new prime minister dismantling the old order. He uses parliamentary speeches to slam Fidesz MPs, acts unusually \u2018offensive\u2019 for a traditional prime minister, interrupts, stands up and calls out the opposition during sessions. Most recently, Magyar transformed crisis management into a series of spectacular live streams.<\/p>\n This is a deliberate strategy to produce clippable content for social media, extending the momentum of electoral victory and, most importantly, giving supporters a sense that they are participating in governance itself. It also helps an insurgent government avoid appearing to become the detached establishment it defeated. Magyar calls it \u2018absolute cinema\u2019.<\/p>\n Losing the Narrative<\/p>\n The similarities between Magyar and Siegmund become even sharper when their opponents attack. Magyar entered the election after more than a year of sustained attempts by Fidesz, government communications, public and pro-government media and aligned campaign groups to define him as dangerous, ridiculous, foreign-controlled or economically threatening. International observers later described the 2026 Fidesz campaign as \u2018divisive and fear-mongering\u2019, documented extensive overlap between government and ruling-party messaging and noted the use of manipulative AI content to discredit opponents<\/a>.<\/p>\n Fidesz portrayed Magyar as Zelenskyy\u2019s ally, Weber\u2019s puppet, a tax-raiser and a threat of war through numerous billboards, AI videos and digital advertising. Magyar repeatedly turned the smear back against its creators, including by posing with the billboards himself. Rather than hiding from the caricatures, he circulated them to his own audience and turned the attempted humiliation into an attack on the resources being spent to discredit him.<\/p>\n On 14 August, Der Spiegel put Siegmund on its cover as \u2018Germany\u2019s most dangerous man<\/a>\u2019. Siegmund called it \u2018very good advertising\u2019. He began signing copies for supporters and posting videos of himself doing so; one signed issue reportedly sold for \u20ac1,010. At the Quedlinburg motorcade, Reuters photographed supporters wearing shirts carrying the same \u2018most dangerous man\u2019 message.<\/p>\n The failure of Germany\u2019s mainstream media to hurt AfD<\/a> by repeatedly telling voters that the party is dangerous, far-right and unacceptable\u2014only to continue doing so even more forcefully\u2014is strikingly similar to what happened in Hungary. Fidesz equally retained enormous communications and institutional power compared with Tisza, but increasingly struggled to make its attacks and narratives define its challenger. Magyar could instead present each new denunciation as evidence that an entrenched system was frightened of losing power.<\/p>\n A recent survey conducted by INSA on 20\u201321 August is particularly telling from this perspective: it found 49 per cent of Germans saying they were not afraid of AfD<\/a>, compared with 42 per cent who were. At the same time, 53 per cent described the party as right-wing extremist. A proposed party-ban application split respondents exactly 42\u201342. The label has therefore not disappeared, but for a large part of the electorate it is evidently no longer producing automatic political deterrence.<\/p>\n Germany\u2019s response has nevertheless continued to rely heavily on exclusion and institutional warnings. The firewall<\/a> against cooperation remains in place, while arguments over a possible AfD ban, state-security surveillance and how institutions should respond to an AfD government continue.<\/p>\n The AfD\u2019s Saxony-Anhalt organization has been classified by the state Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization since 2023. The agency says the party attacks human dignity and democratic principles and cites racist, ethnonationalist and anti-democratic rhetoric.<\/p>\n Siegmund and the AfD reject<\/a> the political legitimacy of that judgment. They argue that a domestic intelligence service sitting under a CDU-led Interior Ministry is being used against a democratic opposition party and have accused it of political interference; Siegmund has proposed restructuring the service if elected. The Interior Ministry denies political influence and says the agency operates under law.<\/p>\n Whether that classification is legally justified and whether voters regard the classifier as politically neutral are two different questions. If institutions are not seen as credible, surveillance only reinforces the narrative it is intended to counter.<\/p>\n Some of the German mainstream is starting to realize<\/a> the grave strategic errors made in how the AfD has been treated, asking whether the firewall is failing and whether it has produced the opposite effect, mainly strengthening the AfD. Former CDU chairman Armin Laschet still rejected governing with the hard-right party, but attributed its growth partly to distrust of established parties, economic insecurity and voters feeling politically misunderstood.<\/p>\n The credibility problem reaches the government itself. A YouGov survey of 2,091 voters found that only 29 per cent expect Merz to remain chancellor<\/a> until the scheduled 2029 election, while 54 per cent expect him to be replaced earlier.<\/p>\n When the Insurgent Starts Reshaping the System<\/p>\n Hungary offers Germany another lesson, this time about what happens after the insurgent wins.<\/p>\n Magyar did not simply replace Orb\u00e1n\u2019s ministers. His two-thirds majority has imposed an eight-year prime-ministerial limit<\/a> counting previous service, effectively preventing Orb\u00e1n from returning as premier; abolished the Orb\u00e1n-era Sovereignty Protection Office; created a powerful new asset-recovery authority; removed President Tam\u00e1s Sulyok<\/a> through constitutional amendment; changed rules affecting Constitutional Court personnel; and imposed a 12-year cumulative term limit on MPs, affecting around one third of opposition politicians sitting in the current parliament.<\/p>\n These are the same categories of institutions that the German establishment fears an AfD government might seek to reshape: Siegmund has already promised<\/a> to terminate public-broadcasting treaties, restructure the state administration, change education and migration policy, cut funding for democracy programmes, and reconsider the future of the state Verfassungsschutz, which currently monitors his own party. His 100-day programme also includes reducing the number of ministries and withdrawing support from programmes associated with the present political order.<\/p>\n That leads us to the assumption that an insurgent victory can be followed by the argument that institutions inherited from the previous political order are not neutral checks but remnants of that order\u2014and therefore should be dismantled.<\/p>\n Europe has largely interpreted Magyar\u2019s overhaul through the language of democratic restoration, even while individual measures have attracted criticism. The European Commission\u2019s July Rule of Law report<\/a> praised Hungary\u2019s \u2018intense reform efforts\u2019 and described the speed of change as \u2018impressive\u2019, while EU governments approved a revised recovery plan tied to judicial, anti-corruption and transparency reforms.<\/p>\n \u2018An institution can retain constitutional authority; it is worth nothing if it loses political legitimacy in the eyes of voters\u2019<\/p>\n
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