The recent rise of radical right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has raised serious concerns about democratic backsliding in Germany. Founded in 2013, the party has seen a surge in popularity over the past 13 years, achieving 20.8 percent of the popular vote in the 2025 elections and becoming the second-largest party in Germany’s parliament today. Though many categorize the AfD as a serious threat to German democracy, I believe their current capacity to erode democratic institutions remains restricted. Using Levitsky and Ziblatt’s framework of democratic erosion, I argue that mainstream political parties protect democracy by successfully utilizing a strategy of exclusion — Brandmauer — as a “gatekeeping” mechanism against extremism, preventing the AfD from translating electoral gains into executive power. 

In How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that the responsibility of protecting democracy against authoritarian encroachment lies entirely on political elites. Political elites must work together to block extremist outsiders from accessing power, denying the outsider political legitimacy and power. Brandmauer (roughly translated as “firewall”) is a German political strategy and informal norm that refers to the exclusion of extremist individuals and parties from politics. This norm has operated successfully to protect democracy, demonstrated in two key events which I will showcase below.

Through Brandmauer, German political parties have refused to form governing coalitions with the AfD, keeping executive power away from AfD hands despite their electoral popularity. The results of the 2025 federal election and the coalition-forming that followed substantiated Levitsky and Ziblatt’s claim that democracy depends not on voters’ whims, but on elite coordination that denies extremists access to executive office. In the 2025 election, a significant number of Germans showed their support for the AfD, reflected in the 20.8% they received in overall vote share. Compared to the 10.4% they received in 2021, their vote share had doubled, and they gained 152 seats in Parliament, completely overtaking the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Despite the AfD’s substantial parliamentary representation, the largest group in Parliament — conservative parties Christian Democratic Union of Germany and Christian Social Union in Bavaria (which together form the CDU/CSU bloc) — strongly rejected the idea of forming a majority coalition with the AfD, with party leader Friedrich Merz stating that the party would “distance ourselves from them very clearly and explicitly.” Instead of attempting to ally with or co-opt the AfD, CDU/CSU refused to include the AfD in coalition negotiations, ensuring they would not have a say in executive decisions. CDU/CSU formed a majority coalition with their ideological rival, the SPD; despite ideological differences, the two parties enforced the norm of mutual toleration, accepting compromise on policy goals such as tax breaks and immigration. In this instance, cross-partisan coordination gatekept democracy and blocked extremist AfD members from accessing executive authority, subsequently denying them any further political legitimacy. 

A second event where political parties acted as “gatekeepers of democracy” was the enforcement of Brandmauer during the 2020 Thuringian government crisis, when political elites punished mainstream party members that breached the “firewall” through coordinating with the AfD. During 2020 elections for the Minister President of German state Thuringia, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) put forward Thomas Kemmerich as their candidate. Although he was not expected to win, the AfD abandoned their candidate and strategically threw all their votes behind Kemmerich, winning him the election. From the perspective of Levitsky and Ziblatt, this win represented a breakdown of the elite gatekeeping mechanism, because an extremist party had intentionally influenced executive selection. In the weeks following, however, political elites rushed to condemn the election, strongly upholding the norm of Brandmauer to rectify this mistake. Parties from all across the political spectrum leveled intense criticism against Kemmerich, including condemnation from the national leaders of the CDU and FDP. Chancellor Angela Merkel from the CDU declared the incident “unforgivable” and a “bad day for democracy”, while FDP Chairman Christian Lindner called it a “mistake” on his party’s end. The consequences of this political elite backlash were immediate and severe. Not only was Kemmerich himself forced to resign, party leaders associated with the Thuringia scandal faced immense intra-party backlash and were forced to step down as well. These included prominent political figures such as CDU leader Kramp-Karrenbauer, who was blamed for not preventing the situation, and CDU politician Christian Hirte, who congratulated and legitimized Kemmerich’s win on Twitter. This episode demonstrated that Brandmauer operates not only through coalition refusal, but also through active reinforcement. Despite the firewall breach, political elites instantly reacted to counter the mistake, maintaining the exclusionary gatekeeping mechanism Levitsky and Ziblatt claim is essential to democracy. 

Though the AfD poses a significant electoral threat to German democracy, political elites have repeatedly and successfully shielded Germany from authoritarian encroachment by upholding Brandmauer. This specific form of gatekeeping has been displayed by the refusal of mainstream political parties to form coalitions or alliances with the AfD, and the effective punishment of political elites who ally with the AfD by other political elites. Thus, these exclusion tactics by mainstream elites, which Levitsky and Ziblatt have argued to be crucial to democracy, have successfully barricaded the AfD from executive power and legitimacy. Without access to the majority coalition and deprived of executive authority, AfD members have been confined to mere seat-fillers of Parliament — present in numbers, but powerless in government. Political exclusion prevents them from shaping state policy, setting the legislative agenda, or influencing executive decision-making. All in all, Germany’s Brandmauer is a stellar example of gatekeeping success, proving that Levitsky and Ziblatt’s exclusionary blueprint is one political elites should follow to prevent the erosion of democracy.