Germans went to the polls last weekend to elect a new government, and at first glance the result throws up no surprises. The conservative CDU/CSU, the party that has dominated (West) German politics since the end of the Second World War, came first. It’s likely to enter a coalition with the other big beast of German politics, the centre-left SPD. Business as usual in Berlin – or so it seems.

Underneath the surface of consensus politics, seismic changes have been at work. An increasing number of working-class Germans no longer feels represented by the centrists, and now many of them have turned to the right, fuelling the rise of the anti-immigration AfD party, which came second in the election. Increasingly out of touch with workers, mainstream politicians are finding it difficult to understand why this is happening. Their inaction has allowed the AfD to become Germany’s new workers’ party.

According to post-election polling, a staggering 38 per cent of workers voted for the AfD last Sunday, nearly twice the average voteshare of 21 per cent. Point this out to German observers and many will tell you that this is just a tiny group of blue-collar workers who aren’t representative of modern German society. Matthias Diermeier, a sociologist at the German Economic Institute, for instance, argues that anyone analysing those election statistics should take into account that Germany is no longer a ‘society of workers’ but a society of ‘employees and pensioners.’

Diermeier is not alone in this assessment. It’s part of the foundation myth of post-war Germany. Worried that the idea of the ‘class struggle’, a concept that came out of 19th-century leftwing theory, most notably the writings of Karl Marx, had contributed to the rise of both communism and fascism, the young West German state was determined to do things differently from 1949. It built a ‘social market economy’ that combined free market principles with a strong welfare state, allowed trade unions a strong place in it and declared the class war over.

By the time I went to school in Germany in the 1990s, we were taught that social classes no longer existed. Now society was made up of a multitude of ‘milieus’ that overlapped. In other words, there were supposedly few social, economic and cultural markers of someone’s background. While it’s normal in the UK or the US to speak of ‘class’, you can’t do that in Germany without sounding like a 20th-century dinosaur.

But class is of course real, especially in Germany where, according to OECD data, social mobility is lower than in most other developed countries. Accordingly, it has an impact on how people feel about politics and how they vote. People may criticise the markers that were chosen to determine the ‘working-class vote’ of the 2025 election, but according to every other socio-economic indicator, the AfD vote also remains distinctive. Nearly 30 per cent of people with lower and middling levels of formal education voted for the party, as did nearly 40 per cent of those in ‘bad’ financial circumstances.

The former socialist East Germany, where people found it difficult to accumulate wealth or private property during the Cold War, voted AfD in much higher numbers than the middle-class dominated West. Even in the West, the industrial Ruhr region has become a new focus for the AfD. Gelsenkirchen, for instance, a former coal-mining hub which now has the lowest average income in Germany, used to be an SPD stronghold. This time the AfD won there, taking a quarter of the votes. Whichever way you define workers, they are clearly turning their backs on mainstream parties. If those parties continue to put their heads in the sand and pretend working-class concerns don’t exist, they hand the AfD a monopoly on those issues.

What those issues are is harder to define. Since the same pattern exists in the US, the UK, France, Austria and other Western democracies, where working class-voters are increasingly drawn towards rightwing politics, this is only in part a Germany-specific issue. Ask AfD voters what’s important to them and you get a pretty good idea of what drove workers away from the mainstream. Unsurprisingly, top of the list is immigration, which nearly 90 per cent worry about, according to a new survey. A similar number is concerned about freedom of speech. Then follow ‘price increases so high that I can’t pay my bills’ (75 per cent), ‘not being able to sustain my living standard’ (74 per cent) and ‘having financial problems when I’m old’ (71 per cent).

Leftwing groups and parties have done little to reassure workers that they take these concerns seriously. The German Trade Union Confederation for instance focused its energy on explaining to members that the AfD was ‘the enemy of working people’, pointing to its social conservatism and libertarian economic values. But at the same time, it is unreservedly pro-migration despite the fact that surveys indicate that around two thirds of Germans want drastic changes in this area, including border controls.

There is little understanding around working-class scepticism on the issue of mass immigration. The Vice President of the Bundestag, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, recently claimed that the issue had ‘damn little to do with people’s daily lives.’ It probably doesn’t in her case. In an interview, she once explained that she lived in a house ‘with a garden and a pond’ and her kids went to a private Waldorf school because they found their state school ‘dreadful’. Meanwhile in Gelsenkirchen, 60 percent of school-age children now have a ‘migration background’, many don’t speak German, and some have experienced trauma and violence. German working class children will find that the environment around them is changing and so will their parents.

This is also true for adults. In 2023, Gelsenkirchen police registered the highest crime rates since 2015 with 41.6 per cent of the suspects being non-Germans. It’s hard to see how life for a working-class family in Gelsenkirchen would not have changed due to increasing levels of migration even if the reality many middle-class Germans find themselves in looks very different.

Economically, the AfD may be libertarian, but many workers don’t oppose cuts to the welfare state per se. The SPD has increasingly boosted its support for those who are not in work by using the taxes of those who are. State expenditure for the so-called Bürgergeld, Germany’s unemployment payment, has risen to over 37 billion last year. Nearly half of the recipients are non-Germans. This system was introduced by the SPD-led government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Many workers, who just about get by on their salaries each month, are critical of a system that uses their taxes on welfare while they see infrastructure crumbling around them. Public transport is becoming more unreliable and public services are under strain.

Culturally, many workers feel alienated by the internationalism of the middle classes. The idea that people are interchangeable, that open borders solve demographic issues, that workplaces can be moved from one country to another and that national identity should be frowned upon feels like the erosion of community and identity to people who often have long roots in a particular place that they love and where they feel at home. Add layers of culture war, urban-rural divides, conflicts over environmentalism and a public focus on ethnicity over class to the mix and the contours of a powerful alienation of working class communities emerge. The AfD’s combative anti-woke rhetoric is a powerful pull for many German workers who feel what they regard as ‘common sense’ has become a cancellable offence in the public sphere.

None of those dynamics are a secret or particularly novel observations, yet German middle class observers in general and members of the political class in particular continue to close their eyes to them. Nearly 90 per cent of parliamentarians in the outgoing Bundestag hold university degrees. In 1949, fewer than half did. So it’s hardly surprising that the reality of working class life is hard to empathise with at the heart of German politics. But that’s exactly what German mainstream politicians must do if they want to rebuild trust in communities they are losing at rapid pace.

Workers exist and so do their concerns. Middle-class opinion makers and politicians don’t have to agree with them. That’s what a multi-party system is for. But when one part of society feels there is no party representing its views anymore and everyone is coerced to live by the same consensus then democracy itself is in trouble.