Firewall under pressure: where it stands and where it falls

The much-discussed firewall, i.e. the rejection of cooperation with the Alternative for Germany (AfD), proves to be just as stable in eastern German districts as in western German ones. This finding is surprising, given that the AfD's election results in the East were almost twice as high as in the West. Between 2019 and 2024, around 81 percent of the motions submitted by the AfD in district and city councils across Germany were rejected. On average, there was only a slight difference between the old and new federal states. However, it is striking that in rural areas of eastern Germany, cooperation with the AfD tends to be more frequent than in rural areas of western Germany. This is shown by the first comprehensive analysis of the state of the firewall at the local level, which researchers at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center have now presented.

The study by Daniel Ziblatt, Wolfgang Schroeder, and Florian Bochert is the first to systematically record the number and forms of cooperation between the AfD and established parties for all German councils at the district level. To do this, the researchers analyzed 11,053 meetings of district and city councils between mid-2019 and mid-2024. They only considered direct cooperation with the AfD, i.e. cases in which other parties agreed to content-related motions from the AfD.

During the period under review, the AfD submitted a total of 4,968 substantive proposals, of which 934 were approved by other parties. This means that direct cooperation with the AfD occurred in about 19 percent of cases (see Table 1, link). In around 81 percent of cases, however, the firewall held – the AfD motions did not receive the support of the other parties. In 177 of 347 districts, there was not a single instance of cooperation (however, in 82 of these districts, the AfD did not submit any motions).

Overall, there are no significant differences between eastern and western Germany. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that in rural areas of eastern Germany, there tends to be more cooperation with the AfD than in urban areas: in rural districts in eastern Germany, there was 26.9 percent cooperation, in urban districts only 16 percent. In western Germany, this difference between urban and rural areas is not as apparent.

In absolute numbers, the highest number of cooperation was found in Hesse (203), Saxony (124) and Saxony-Anhalt (129). In the district of Fulda, in Dresden and Frankfurt am Main, the firewall was broken relatively often, with over 40 cooperations (Figure 2, link). However, there were also significantly more meetings and motions per year here than in other districts. Therefore, it is more meaningful to look at the cooperations in relation to the number of motions submitted. Measured by this ratio, most cooperations took place in Saxony-Anhalt (27 percent), Rhineland-Palatinate (24.7 percent) and Hesse (24.3 percent). Districts where the AfD is strongly represented or particularly active did not necessarily show the most cooperation with the party. Rather, there are individual districts throughout Germany that stand out due to the number of cooperations (Figure 3).

Smaller parties and voter associations were particularly likely to agree with AfD proposals, followed by the FDP and the CDU. None of the established parties has been consistently successful in maintaining the firewall. Even the Left Party cooperated with the AfD in certain cases. In the eastern German districts, it was often not the controversial issues at the federal level that led to the AfD achieving cooperation, but administrative or infrastructural issues such as transport projects. In the western German districts, on the other hand, cooperation on controversial issues such as asylum and COVID-19 occurred significantly more often.

Wolfgang Schroeder is a Fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and a Professor at Kassel University.

Daniel Ziblatt is Direktor of the Transformations of Democracy department at the WZB and the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University.

Florian Bochert is a Student Assistant at the WZB.