The Firewall And The Ballot: What The Church Says A Majority Can Confer

On Sunday night in Magdeburg, two men claimed democracy for opposite conclusions. The AfD’s national co-leader said the voters had “definitively rejected” the firewall that keeps his party out of power. The CDU’s general secretary said her party “will not work with them.” Both sentences were spoken within an hour of each other, and both were spoken in democracy’s name. The Church has a settled way of sorting out a fight like this, and it starts by asking what a vote is for.

The News Story

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt by a wide margin, taking 43.8% of the vote according to preliminary official results. That is the highest share the party has ever recorded in any German election and more than double the 20.8% it won in the same state in 2021. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has led Saxony-Anhalt for 24 years, fell to 17.2%, roughly half its 2021 result. Projections for public broadcasters ARD and ZDF put the Left Party, the Social Democrats, and the Greens at about 9% each. The BSW, a populist party that combines left-wing economics with restrictive migration policy and calls for closer ties to Russia, narrowly cleared the 5% threshold needed to enter the legislature.

The AfD went into the vote seeking an absolute majority so it could govern alone. The latest projections give it 39 of the 83 seats in the Magdeburg state parliament, 3 short of the 42 required. The party has never led a government at any level in Germany. Every other major party refuses to work with it under a policy known as the “firewall.” In 2024, the AfD finished first in neighboring Thuringia but was kept out of power when a CDU governor formed a minority government.

Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s 35-year-old candidate for state premier, told ARD that “we have written history” and that the vote was “also a signal toward Berlin.” He said Merz had been “a very good campaigner for us” and that every day the chancellor spends in office “is one too many.” AfD co-leader Alice Weidel called the result “sensational” and said the party had “received a very clear mandate to govern here.” Co-leader Tino Chrupalla said voters had “definitively rejected” the firewall.

The path to a majority runs through the BSW. Together the two parties would hold 43 seats. But BSW co-chair Amira Mohamed Ali said Sunday that her party would vote neither for Siegmund nor for CDU premier Sven Schulze, and instead proposed a nonpartisan premier, supported by both the BSW and the AfD. Siegmund rejected that idea and suggested he might persuade individual lawmakers from other parties to switch sides.

Schulze, the incumbent CDU premier, congratulated the AfD on becoming the state’s strongest party and said: “We’re going to have to live with this result.” He later said he did not intend to cooperate with the AfD. Any alliance he assembled would need at least tacit support from the Left Party, with which the CDU also refuses to form coalitions. Franziska Hoppermann, the CDU’s national general secretary, called it “a very difficult result for us” and said the party “will not work with” the AfD, describing it as right-wing extremist. Merz made no statement Sunday evening and left CDU headquarters after 10 p.m. local time.

Saxony-Anhalt’s domestic intelligence agency has classified the state AfD branch as a proven right-wing extremist organization, a designation the party rejects as politically motivated. Siegmund campaigned on a “deportation offensive” from day one, permitting homeschooling, replacing rainbow flags at public schools with the national flag, and starting the process of withdrawing the state from its regional public broadcaster. German states control education and policing and hold seats in the Bundesrat, the upper house of parliament; Saxony-Anhalt, with 2.1 million residents, holds 4 of its 69 votes.^[1]

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

What A Vote Is For

The Church likes democracy, and she is specific about why. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church quotes John Paul II on the point: the Church “values the democratic system inasmuch as it ensures the participation of citizens in making political choices, guarantees to the governed the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and of replacing them through peaceful means when appropriate.”^[2] Every clause of that sentence happened in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday. A party that had governed for 24 years was held accountable. Half its voters left. Nobody was shot. On the Church’s own terms, the system is doing exactly what she values it for.

The first thing a Catholic owes the 43.8% is to take them seriously as people. The Compendium says a people is “not a shapeless multitude, an inert mass to be manipulated and exploited, but a group of persons, each of whom” is “able to form its own opinion on public matters.”^[3] That’s a rebuke to anyone in Berlin tempted to explain Sunday as a mood or a protest. Nearly half the people who voted in a state of 2.1 million looked at their options and chose. They had reasons: a wealth gap with the West that has outlasted the Berlin Wall by 37 years, a population that keeps shrinking, a national government that can’t get the economy moving. The Compendium says political parties “are called to interpret the aspirations of civil society, orienting them towards the common good.”^[4] A party that loses half its vote in a state it has run for a generation has stopped interpreting anything. That failure belongs to the CDU before it belongs to anyone else.

Pope Leo XIV said the same thing in May, in general terms that now read like a description of Magdeburg. “When politics abandons a long-term perspective and reduces itself to short-term calculations or sterile polarizations, then the language of the common good loses credibility, and, at the same time, social inequalities and divisions grow.”^[5] A firewall that consists only of refusal, with no answer for the people on the other side of it, is a short-term calculation. It buys one more term. It doesn’t buy back credibility.

What A Majority Cannot Supply

But now turn the same rule the other way, because it cuts both ways, and that’s the whole point of it. Chrupalla’s claim on Sunday was that the voters had “definitively rejected” the firewall. Read carefully: that sentence says a vote settles a moral question. The Church says it doesn’t. The Compendium is blunt: democracy is “a ’system’ and as such is a means and not an end,” and “its morality depends on the morality of the ends which it pursues and of the means which it employs.”^[6] The same paragraph carries John Paul II’s warning that “a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.”^[6] Leo XIV repeats it in his own words: “democracy does not consist of rules and procedures alone, but above all of a solid concordance with the facts and a genuine commitment to the good of individuals and society as a whole.”^[7]

The question the Church puts to the AfD is the one it puts to every party. Set aside the percentage. What are the ends, and what are the means?

Some of the AfD’s program is ordinary politics. Homeschooling is legal in most of the world, and a state can decide how it funds its broadcaster. But three items on Siegmund’s list run directly into the Church’s teaching, and the size of his vote doesn’t change that.

The first is the “deportation offensive,” which the party frames with the word “remigration.” The Compendium says immigrants “are to be received as persons and helped, together with their families, to become a part of societal life.”^[8] Leo XIV goes further and makes this the measure of a society’s justice: “The way a society treats them reveals whether its sense of justice is driven by fear or by the spirit of fraternity.”^[9] A state government that opens with a task force to remove people has answered that question about itself on its first day. The German Economic Institute warns the policy would be “ruinous” for a state whose hospitals run on foreign-born workers. The Church’s objection comes before the practical one.

The second is the plan to require organizations that receive state money to demonstrate a “patriotic basic attitude.” That’s a loyalty test. The Compendium’s description of a people, quoted above, insists that persons in a political community “maintain an irrepressible autonomy at the level of personal existence and of the goals to be pursued.”^[3] A government that conditions public support on the right attitude has decided that autonomy is negotiable.

The third is harder to name and matters more. Siegmund, asked whether the Holocaust was humanity’s worst crime, declined to say so, on the grounds that he would not rank crimes. At AfD events, an emcee has shouted “Sieg!” and the crowd answered “Mund!” Leo XIV wrote about exactly this in May, warning of “a disconcerting loss of historical memory, as first-hand accounts of the Holocaust and the two World Wars are disappearing,” which “leads to a selective or distorted rewriting of the past.”^[10] A party can win 44% and still be doing that. The vote doesn’t launder it.

Germany’s own bishops said all this in February 2024, unanimously, in a declaration titled “Ethnic Nationalism and Christianity Are Incompatible,” and they named the AfD.^[11] Parties built on that worldview, they said, “cannot be elected” by Christians. That declaration remains in force.

The Firewall Tested By The Same Rule

The rule about ends and means applies to the parties keeping the firewall too, and that’s the part of this story Catholic commentary tends to skip.

The Compendium’s praise of democracy comes with a warning. The Church “cannot encourage the formation of narrow ruling groups which usurp the power of the State for individual interests or for ideological ends.”^[2] A firewall is legitimate when it’s a refusal of conscience: a party declining to share power with a program it judges incompatible with human dignity. Hoppermann’s statement was that kind of refusal, and she gave reasons. But a firewall becomes something else when it turns into a method for the parties that lost to keep governing without answering the people who defeated them. A CDU minority government in Magdeburg propped up by tacit votes from the Left, a party the CDU also refuses to work with, would be governing at 17% against 44%. The Compendium’s phrase for a ruling arrangement that survives by exclusion is “narrow ruling groups,” and it was written as a warning.

The means test catches the AfD here as well. Siegmund’s suggestion that he might get to 42 seats by persuading individual lawmakers to switch parties after the election is a way of manufacturing a majority the voters didn’t give him. Leo XIV describes a politics that “often turns to misinformation and ridiculing opponents, and systematically cultivating fears and resentments.”^[12] Nobody in Magdeburg on Sunday night sounded exempt from that description.

What the Church asks of elected officials is harder than either refusing or ruling. The Compendium grants representatives real freedom from the day-to-day wishes of their electors, and then defines their work as “the function of synthesis and mediation that serve the common good.”^[13] Synthesis and mediation. That means the CDU has to answer the wealth gap and the emptying towns with policy, whether or not it ever sits in a room with Siegmund. And it means the AfD, if it wants to be treated as something other than an extremist organization, has to drop the parts of its program that treat persons as problems, and has to stop winking at the chant.

Where The Firewall And The Ballot Meet

The Church holds both truths at once, and she doesn’t strain doing it. The ballot is real. Forty-four percent of a state chose, and the people who chose are persons with reasons that deserve an answer. And the ballot is a means. It cannot confer a right to deport, to test loyalty, or to soften the memory of what Germany did, because no majority can confer those things. The firewall and the ballot both fail the moment either one is treated as the last word.

Pray for Saxony-Anhalt this week. Pray especially for the Catholics there, who are about 3% of the population and who have been told by their own bishops that one party is closed to them and by their own state that the other parties have run out of answers. That is a narrow place to stand. It is also, the Church would say, exactly where a Christian citizen is supposed to be standing: holding the values that make democracy worth anything, and insisting that everyone in the room be held to them.

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This story turns on the Church’s teaching that democracy is a means, judged by the ends it pursues and the means it employs, and that no majority can confer what the moral law withholds.

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Footnotes

1. Esme Nicholson, “German Exit Polls Suggest Far-Right Party Has Big Lead in Regional Election,” NPR, September 6, 2026, npr.org; Geir Moulson and Kerstin Sopke, “German Far-Right Party Set for Regional Election Triumph but Uncertain of Governing,” Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, September 6, 2026, pbs.org; “German Far-Right AfD Wins Saxony-Anhalt Election, Falls Short of Majority,” Al Jazeera, September 6, 2026, aljazeera.com; Andrew Pantazi, “AfD Wins Record 44% in Saxony-Anhalt, Testing Germany’s Far-Right Firewall,” Axios, September 6, 2026, axios.com; “Germany’s Far-Right AfD Win Historic Victory, but Fall Short of Majority in Saxony-Anhalt,” CNN, September 6, 2026, cnn.com; “AfD on Track for First Far-Right Postwar Majority in Saxony-Anhalt,” Fox News, September 6, 2026, foxnews.com; “German Far-Right Party Set for Strong Win in Regional Election but Uncertain of Governing,” NBC News, September 6, 2026, nbcnews.com. ↩
2. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 406, quoting John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, no. 46. ↩
3. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 385. ↩
4. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 413. ↩
5. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2026), no. 63, vatican.va. ↩
6. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 407, quoting John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, no. 46, and Evangelium Vitae, no. 70. ↩
7. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 134. ↩
8. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 298. ↩
9. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 81. ↩
10. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 191. ↩
11. German Bishops’ Conference, “Völkischer Nationalismus und Christentum sind unvereinbar” (Augsburg, February 22, 2024), as reported in “German Bishops Denounce Far Right and Ethnic Nationalism,” International Catholic Migration Commission, February 24, 2024, icmc.net. ↩
12. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 206. ↩
13. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 409. ↩