What MAGA Can Learn From Germany’s AfD — And What the AfD Learned From Trump

Guest post by Naomi Weisz

For years, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland looked across the Atlantic for inspiration.

Donald Trump showed that a political movement could bypass a hostile media establishment, challenge the rules imposed by the old political class and mobilize millions of voters around a simple promise: put your own people first.

WATCH:

Now, after the AfD’s historic breakthrough in Saxony-Anhalt, the direction of political learning appears to be reversing. Leading voices in the MAGA movement are looking to Germany and asking what Republicans can learn from the AfD’s success.

“The pupils have become the teachers,” Steve Bannon told AfD Member of the European Parliament Petr Bystron on War Room after the election.

The AfD won 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt, more than doubling its previous result. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU fell to 17.2 percent, while turnout reached a record 77.8 percent.

For Bannon and other MAGA strategists, the remarkable part was not simply the AfD’s share of the vote. It was the party’s ability to mobilize people who had previously given up on politics.

From “America First” to Germany First

Bystron openly acknowledged how much the AfD had learned from the American populist movement. “We Alternative for Germany, we learned from Donald Trump, we learned from MAGA,” he told Bannon.

He pointed to years of exchanges between representatives of both movements and argued that this experience contributed to the AfD’s ability to mobilize voters.

The central lesson was simple. Trump built his movement around “America First.” The AfD translated the same principle into German politics.

Bystron summed up the AfD’s approach as doing politics “for the German people again,” explicitly comparing it with Trump’s America First agenda.

In practical terms, the AfD has connected that principle with secure borders, remigration, lower taxes, affordable energy, greater public safety and the revival of German industry.

Bystron argued that ordinary voters want a safe and prosperous country and a government that places their interests ahead of expensive ideological projects at home and abroad.

But the AfD learned another lesson from MAGA: political success does not necessarily come from moderating positions in search of approval from hostile media and political institutions.

Instead, the party increasingly offered voters a clear choice. In Saxony-Anhalt, its candidate presented the AfD as a force seeking fundamental change rather than another junior partner in an establishment coalition.

According to Bystron, this uncompromising approach was crucial because it gave disillusioned non-voters a reason to return to the ballot box.

Many had concluded that changing parties made little difference because governments ultimately continued along the same political course. The AfD offered them the prospect that an election could actually change the direction of the country.

The CDU’s Mistake: Campaigning Right, Governing Left

For Bystron, Friedrich Merz and the CDU demonstrate precisely what happens when a nominally conservative party follows the opposite strategy. He accused Merz of winning votes with conservative promises before the federal election and then returning to establishment politics once the ballots had been counted.

Bystron specifically pointed to Merz’s rejection of cooperation with the AfD and his subsequent coalition with the Social Democrats.

In Bystron’s interpretation, millions of Germans voted for a political shift to the right but received another government involving the center-left SPD.

“The people are sick of it,” he told Bannon, arguing that voters no longer accept being promised conservative policies during an election campaign only to see a different course pursued afterward.

The criticism goes beyond coalition politics. Bystron portrayed the CDU-led federal government as part of a political establishment that has presided over Germany’s economic decline.

He argued that deindustrialization is no longer merely a warning about the future: companies are already closing facilities, moving production abroad or struggling to remain competitive, while highly skilled Germans increasingly seek opportunities elsewhere.

At the same time, Bystron contrasted Merz’s priorities with the America First principle the AfD adopted from Trump.

He criticized the German government for directing enormous resources toward Ukraine, the European Union, climate policies and migration while Germany itself struggles with high taxes, debt, energy costs and industrial decline.

That contrast helps explain the political significance of the result in Saxony-Anhalt. The CDU had governed the state for more than two decades.

It was not defeated by a party trying to become a slightly more conservative version of the CDU. It was defeated by a party promising a fundamental break with the existing political direction.

For MAGA, the parallel with the United States is obvious. The lesson the AfD drew from Trump was that an insurgent movement can lose its reason for existence if it becomes indistinguishable from the establishment it was created to challenge.

The AfD’s argument to conservative voters was therefore not simply that the CDU had failed to deliver enough conservative policies. It was that the CDU could no longer be trusted to deliver the political change it promised.

Now MAGA Is Studying the AfD

This is where the story comes full circle. During Bannon’s program, Dan Schultz, the architect of MAGA’s “Precinct Strategy,” pointed directly to the German election as an example for American conservatives ahead of the U.S. midterms.

Schultz focused on turnout. He contrasted the extraordinarily high participation in Saxony-Anhalt with the much lower turnout typical among Republican voters in American midterm elections. “We can learn from the Germans,” he said.

His message was intensely practical. MAGA needs precinct committeemen, volunteers, poll workers and observers, but above all it needs people willing to organize locally and bring supporters to the polls.

For Schultz, the AfD result demonstrated what becomes possible when a political movement succeeds in turning dissatisfaction into actual electoral participation.

Bannon immediately picked up the argument in his conversation with Bystron. If MAGA achieved turnout comparable to what the AfD had just demonstrated, he argued, Republicans could win additional seats in the House of Representatives.

He therefore asked Bystron how the AfD had managed such extraordinary grassroots mobilization despite having comparatively limited financial resources.

Bystron’s response was striking because he turned the compliment back toward the United States. The AfD, he said, had learned precisely this type of politics from Trump and MAGA.

After years in which German populists studied the American movement, MAGA strategists were now examining what their German allies had done with those lessons.

Mobilizing the People Who Stopped Voting

The AfD’s answer to the turnout question may be the most relevant lesson for MAGA. Bystron argued that the party did not simply persuade traditional voters to switch parties. It mobilized people who had become so disillusioned with the political system that they had previously stopped voting.

These voters, he said, had come to believe that elections changed the names and colors of the governing parties without producing substantial political change.

The AfD’s campaign sought to break that resignation by promising something much larger than incremental policy adjustments.
Bystron described the resulting mood as one of political hope.

In his account, many voters felt for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall that fundamental political change was genuinely possible.

Whether one shares that assessment or not, the mobilization behind the AfD demonstrates the electoral power of convincing politically alienated citizens that their vote can matter again.

That lesson travels easily across the Atlantic. Political movements do not produce exceptional turnout merely by telling their supporters how terrible the opposition is.

They produce it by convincing people that going to the polls can lead to a materially different government.

Trump understood this during his rise to power.

His campaigns attracted Americans who felt ignored by both parties and who did not regard conventional Republican politicians as capable of producing fundamental change. The AfD has increasingly applied the same logic in Germany.

A Transatlantic Populist Feedback Loop

The relationship between MAGA and the AfD has therefore developed into something more interesting than simple political imitation. It has become a transatlantic feedback loop.

The AfD studied Trump’s political insurgency and adopted elements of MAGA’s emphasis on national sovereignty, direct communication, grassroots mobilization and refusal to seek approval from hostile institutions.

It learned the political power of reducing a complicated program to an easily understood principle: the government should put the interests of its own citizens first.
The result in Saxony-Anhalt has now given MAGA something to study in return.

The AfD demonstrated how a movement facing hostility from much of the political and media establishment could mobilize disillusioned citizens in extraordinary numbers and turn political frustration into votes.

Bannon summarized the reversal himself. “You have become the teachers now,” he told Bystron. His message to the American movement was concrete: get back to basics, organize locally, go door to door and make sure that people who agree with the movement actually turn up on Election Day.

That is perhaps the most important exchange taking place between the two movements. MAGA taught the AfD that populist parties do not have to moderate themselves into irrelevance to become successful.

They can challenge the political establishment directly, communicate a clear national-interest agenda and bring politically alienated voters back into the democratic process.

The AfD is now reminding MAGA of the other half of that equation. Popular policies and large audiences are not enough. Political enthusiasm must be converted into organization, organization into turnout and turnout into electoral power.

The pupil learned from the teacher. Now the teacher is taking notes.

MEP Petr Bystron on X: https://x.com/PetrBystronAfD

Dan Schultz on X: https://x.com/DanSchultz2

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