On Oct. 6, Tobias Rausch of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was elected president of Saxony-Anhalt’s state parliament, the first time a member of the party has led a German state legislature. He received 48 votes in a secret ballot, four more than the AfD and the populist Alliance for Social Justice and Economic Reason (BSW) hold together.
Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil of the Social Democrats called the vote a Tabubruch, or “taboo breach.” Sven Schulze, the state’s minister-president and a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), rejected suggestions that the extra votes came from his party. The AfD’s lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, plans to run for Schulze’s office in December.
The vote comes as Germany’s governing parties have adopted increasingly stringent migration measures, turning back asylum seekers at the border, suspending family reunification for some refugees, and lengthening the path to citizenship. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has argued that acting on migration will help counter the far right’s growing appeal. The AfD’s support has risen anyway. The party won 20.8% of the vote in the February 2025 federal election and now averages about 28% in national polls, roughly eight points ahead of Merz’s CDU.
For the roughly 1.3 million Ukrainians living in Germany, the policy shift has already arrived. In November 2025, the federal cabinet approved a bill to move Ukrainians who arrived after April 1, 2025, from Bürgergeld (Citizen’s Allowance, Germany’s standard welfare benefit) to the lower payments given to asylum seekers. In April, a Unity Hub opened in Berlin, funded by Germany and operated by Ukraine, that offers services to Ukrainians and is partly intended to encourage returns. Merz called the return of fighting-age men “essential to ensure Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, its social cohesion and reconstruction.” And in July, the European Union stopped automatically granting protection to newly arriving Ukrainian men who have not met their military obligations.
Anastasiia Yakovlieva, 25, who has lived in Germany since fleeing the war in Ukraine in 2022, said the dean of her Ukrainian university had attended a conference in Berlin where officials were “already organizing special centers for reintegration of Ukrainians back to Ukraine.”
Yakovlieva said that Germany seems to be “working in both directions.” The country has also made it easier for Ukrainians to stay, she said, including by renewing their protection each year, allowing them to exchange Ukrainian driver’s licenses, simplifying recognition of Ukrainian degrees, and offering German classes.
Jan-Werner Müller, a political theorist and professor of politics at Princeton University, said that the AfD has come to “own” migration as an issue. Other German parties, he said, helped by making migration a central topic of debate, which lent legitimacy to far-right framings. The AfD’s perceived competence on migration, he said, has spilled over into other areas such as the economy.
Müller said the federal government has largely addressed the AfD’s complaints about migration, yet the party continues to grow partly because it serves as a vessel for broader discontent. As its name suggests, he said, it provides voters an “alternative” – one that can channel general grievances into anti-migration sentiment.
“No far-right populist has ever run out of scapegoats,” Müller said.
The AfD has directed some of that rhetoric at Ukrainians. Siegmund said during the Saxony-Anhalt campaign that “remigration,” a term the AfD uses for mass deportation, should apply to anyone who does not contribute to society, and included Ukrainian refugees without jobs. The AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt platform called for ending war-refugee status for Ukrainians.
Müller said the AfD often frames such proposals through “ethnopluralism,” the idea that different ethnic and cultural groups should live in their own distinct regions rather than in multicultural societies. The framing, he said, allows the party to present deportation as being in migrants’ own interest.
Ukraine has also featured in right-wing populist campaigns elsewhere in Europe. In Hungary, former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán routinely attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during his reelection campaign before losing April’s election, ending 16 years in power. Sofiia Patkanovtsiy, a Princeton University sophomore from Uzhhorod, a Ukrainian city near the Hungarian border, said “our country and our people were definitely a big thing in the agendas during the [Hungarian] election.”
Employment data complicate the far-right claim that Ukrainian refugees do not contribute, though the data show a gap. Nearly 40% of Ukrainian nationals in Germany were employed in June 2026, with the number growing consistently. Researchers have cited language barriers, a lack of childcare and slow recognition of foreign qualifications.
Yakovlieva said she has seen those barriers firsthand. Her mother, who holds a finance degree from a Ukrainian university, completed a months-long training course recommended by a German job center but was turned down for a kindergarten assistant job because she lacked the required degree.
“Ukrainians are people that are really willing to learn and to practice what they used to practice in Ukraine, just to have their jobs back,” Yakovlieva said. “Sometimes it is just frustrating for people who get refused to even get to an interview.” A 2025 survey by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) found that 94% of Ukrainian refugees in Germany who were not employed said they wanted to work.
Yakovlieva noted that Germany may have a longer-term incentive to keep refugees in the country. “Germany is getting older,” she said. “They need the labor power here.” The German workforce is projected to decrease by 4.7% in the next two decades.
Ukrainians are not the only group facing the shift. Germany has resumed deportations to Syria and Afghanistan, and the federal migration office has revoked protection from a growing share of Syrians whose cases it reviews.
Whether Germany’s stricter approach will slow the AfD remains uncertain. Siegmund needs 42 votes to become minister-president in Saxony-Anhalt; the AfD holds 39 of the state parliament’s 83 seats.
For Yakovlieva, the policy debate does not change what she would need to return to Ukraine: an improvement in “the security situation.”
“Even if the war ends, there is going to be a couple years where the situation in Ukraine is going to be really tough,” she said, “because of the mental health crisis, the financial crisis in Ukraine, and the whole rebuilding process.”
