After Saxony-Anhalt, the case for leaving the euro, Schengen and perhaps the EU itself can no longer be waved away as fringe talk. Germany now faces a sharper argument between the economic pull of European integration and the political case for sovereign control.
The AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt has not proved that Germans want to leave the European Union. It has done something else, and politically it matters a great deal. It has forced a serious question back into view.
What happens when a party arguing for a radical loosening of Germany’s ties to the euro, Schengen and, in some circumstances, the EU itself stops looking like a protest vehicle and starts looking like a durable electoral force?
According to the BBC’s preliminary results from Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD won 43.8 per cent of the vote, far ahead of the CDU on 17.2 per cent, though still short of an outright majority. That followed the party’s 20.8 per cent and 152 seats in the 2025 federal election, a record result which made it the second largest force in the Bundestag. The party had already shown its strength in eastern Germany, including its win in Thuringia in 2024, but Saxony-Anhalt was another step on. A movement once treated as permanently containable now has a mass vote, regional strongholds and national weight.
That does not mean every AfD voter backs Dexit. It does mean that a party carrying sovereignty arguments well beyond the polite limits of Berlin consensus can no longer be dismissed as a sideshow.
Alice Weidel has been unusually direct about what that sovereignty argument could mean in practice. In an interview reported by Anadolu in August, she said an AfD-led federal government would seek Germany’s withdrawal from the euro and the Schengen Area, close national borders and tighten migration policy. On the euro, she argued that Germany had been better off before monetary union. On Schengen, her language was blunt: Germany would close its borders and leave.
On EU membership itself, Weidel’s earlier line was more conditional than immediate rupture. In her 2024 interview with the Financial Times, reported by the Guardian, she said an AfD government would first try to reform the EU by reducing the power of what she called its unelected institutions. If that failed, Germans should be allowed to decide in a referendum, “just as Britain did”.
Taken together, those positions place the euro, Schengen and potentially EU membership itself inside the AfD’s sovereignty argument. But they do not yet amount to a fully worked public blueprint for Dexit. That distinction matters. There is a difference between what AfD leaders have clearly proposed and what Germany would have to negotiate in practice.
Petr Bystron, an AfD MEP in the European Parliament, goes further by arguing that Germany could radically alter its relationship with Brussels without a formal departure at all.
“We don’t even need a Dexit. It would be more than enough to simply stop sending all that money to the EU. The moment the money stopped flowing, the Poles and the French would be out the next day, and by the end of the week, everyone else would follow. Most member states are only still in the EU because of the subsidies, and they put up with the rest through gritted teeth.”
The sovereignty case is not hard to understand. Leaving Schengen would give Berlin formal control over border policy and remove the obligation to remain inside a passport-free area that many German voters now associate with weak external enforcement. Leaving the euro would, in theory, restore monetary sovereignty, allowing Germany once again to set policy around a national currency rather than inside a eurozone built for several very different economies. A full Dexit would go further still, returning legislative, regulatory and trade powers from Brussels to Berlin and putting democratic accountability more squarely back into national politics.
Those are not trivial arguments. They go to the heart of who governs, who decides, and how much room a nation still has to act in its own interest when European and national priorities diverge.
Brexit is important here, not because it proved leaving the EU is painless, but because it proved leaving is possible. Britain left the bloc, left its political institutions, regained full control over immigration rules, trade policy, agriculture and fisheries, and continued as an independent state. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s Brexit analysis also makes clear that this came with costs. The OBR has worked on the assumption that Brexit will leave the UK a less open economy, reducing imports and exports over time and weighing on productivity. Both things can be true at once. Exit brings back powers. It also brings frictions.
That is the precedent that matters most for Germany. The old continental assumption that EU membership is politically irreversible is gone.
Steve Wright, Campaign Lead for Brexit at the Great British PAC, believes the AfD’s rise could have consequences far beyond German domestic politics.
“The rise in popularity for the AfD shows that their policies - many of which run counter to EU membership - have strong support within the German electorate, especially within the eastern states. This is more than a headache for the EU, this has the potential to be existential”
The economic warnings around Dexit are still serious, and any credible case for it has to meet them head on. A 2026 Prognos study found that more than half of German exports go to EU member states, that EU demand supports around €554 billion in gross value added in Germany, and that 7.2 million German jobs depend on that demand. It also found that around 52 per cent of German exports to the EU are intermediate goods moving through integrated European production chains.
That is why many economists are so wary of a break with the existing system. Germany is not simply trading with Europe. Large parts of German industry are embedded in it.
If Germany left the euro, one widely discussed risk is that a new national currency would appreciate sharply. That could make German exports dearer and put pressure on margins in sectors such as cars, engineering, chemicals and electrical goods. The transition would matter as much as the destination. Jochen Stanzl of Consorsbank, in the material cited in the German reporting around this debate, has warned that uncertainty in such a phase would be poisonous for confidence, investment and growth.
Schengen is sometimes presented as the easier target, but Prognos estimates that systematic border controls would still cost Germany around €1.5 billion to €2 billion a year. Transport, commuting, tourism and just-in-time supply chains all work better when borders are open.
Even so, current integration on its own does not settle the argument. It shows what Germany is tied into now. It does not tell us with certainty what a negotiated Dexit would look like, because that would depend on trade terms, regulatory alignment, transitional arrangements, market access and the willingness of both Berlin and Brussels to strike a workable settlement. Britain’s post-EU relationship is one model. The Reuters report on Iceland’s referendum points to another kind of European path, where a country stays outside the EU while maintaining close economic links through the European Economic Area.
Iceland matters because it is a reminder that democratic support for remaining outside the EU is not some historical curiosity. In August, Icelanders voted by 52.8 per cent to 47.2 per cent against reopening EU accession talks, with turnout at 82.5 per cent, according to Reuters. Iceland is not an exit case, because it was never an EU member. But it is still relevant. A prosperous European country was asked whether closer political integration with Brussels was the right path, and a majority said no.
More broadly, sovereignty politics is not confined to Germany. Reuters reported after the 2024 European Parliament election that nationalist, populist and eurosceptic parties were on course to win just under a quarter of the seats in the assembly. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni said in 2025 that national security must remain the exclusive jurisdiction of member states, a pointed defence of national control against Brussels. In Slovakia, Robert Fico said he would not implement the EU’s new migration system and later said Slovakia would block sanctions that harmed its national interests. Those are not exit campaigns, but they do show how firmly sovereignty arguments now run through mainstream European politics.
That is one reason the German debate over banning the AfD matters beyond party tactics. Under Germany’s interior ministry guidance on Article 21 of the Basic Law, only the Federal Constitutional Court can ban a party, and only if there is specific and valid evidence that it seeks to undermine the democratic order in a militant and aggressive way, with at least some realistic prospect of success. The threshold is deliberately high. The same guidance stresses that it would be incompatible with democracy if majority parties could simply remove unwanted rivals from political competition.
There are organised efforts to test that route. EL PAÍS reported in August that the SPD revived calls for a ban, citing a legal report by eight jurists from the Society for the Protection of Freedom Rights which compiled 2,500 pieces of evidence and argued that the AfD was working against Germany’s liberal democratic order. More than 1,000 jurists later signed a letter urging the government and Bundestag to act. At the same time, the same report noted strong opposition from the CDU and from legal critics who warn that a failed ban could reinforce the AfD’s victim narrative and shift a political struggle out of the ballot box and into the courts.
That criticism deserves to be taken seriously. A democracy is entitled to defend itself under its own constitution. But when a party backed by more than 10.3 million second votes in the 2025 federal election is facing organised efforts to remove it from competition, the democratic question is unavoidable. If millions of voters come to believe that the political class cannot beat the AfD politically and is instead looking for a legal route to remove it from competition, the consequences for trust in Germany’s democratic institutions could be profound.
The AfD’s critics will say that constitutional democracy has every right to protect itself from forces that seek to hollow it out from within. That is the serious case for a ban, and it should not be caricatured. But the counter-case is powerful too. Banning a major opposition party would not make the underlying electorate disappear. It could deepen mistrust, harden grievance and confirm the suspicion, already common among AfD voters, that sovereignty is acceptable only when it points in the establishment’s direction.
That brings Germany back to the real question. Not whether Dexit is easy, because it plainly is not. Not whether it is cost free, because the available evidence suggests it would not be. The real question is whether Germans still believe that the economic gains of deep integration are worth the steady transfer of political control that integration entails.
For decades, mainstream Germany treated that bargain as settled. The AfD’s rise has broken that assumption. Dexit is still a minority proposition in national politics. It is no longer an unserious one.
Germany now has to decide, much more openly than before, how much sovereignty it is willing to trade for the benefits of the European order it helped build.