Saxony-Anhalt. A population of just over two million, the sixth-smallest state in Germany. The share of foreign residents here falls well below the national average. This is a place where encountering an immigrant on the street is far rarer than in the big cities of western Germany.
And yet it was here that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), running on an explicitly anti-immigrant platform, swept the state parliament election on September 6 with more than 44 percent of the vote — over double its result in the previous election, and the party’s best showing ever. The ruling Christian Democratic Union saw its support cut in half. Eighty years after the fall of the Nazi regime, the possibility of a far-right party leading a German state government has become real.
The numbers don’t add up on their face. Hostility toward immigrants won its strongest mandate in a place with the fewest of them. That mismatch is the real question this election raises.
The Immigrant as Screen, Not Cause
AfD’s campaign message was unambiguous: deport undocumented migrants, require asylum seekers to work, cut support for Ukrainian refugees. And its most potent pledge — redirect the taxes spent on immigrants toward welfare instead. On its face, this was a textbook anti-immigration campaign.
But most voters in Saxony-Anhalt don’t share their daily lives with those immigrants. What they actually live with is something else: an economy that, more than three decades after reunification, still hasn’t caught up with the west; young people leaving in search of work; hospitals and schools shutting their doors; villages growing older. These anxieties are real, but diffuse — hard to pin on any single cause.
In this context, the “immigrant” functions less as a cause than as a screen — a simple, sharply defined figure onto which complex, structural anxiety can be projected. Forces like globalization, automation, and demographic decline are too abstract to serve as targets for anger. An immigrant, by contrast, is visible, easy to name, and fits neatly into a slogan. The absence of real contact doesn’t blunt this effect — if anything, it makes the figure easier to imagine and exaggerate.
A Pattern That Keeps Repeating
This mismatch isn’t unique to Saxony-Anhalt. Overlay the regions where far-right and right-wing populist parties have surged across Europe, the rise of far-right leaders in parts of South America including Argentina, and the strongholds where MAGA has consolidated its base in the United States, and a common denominator emerges: places left behind by the gains of globalization and left to absorb the costs of industrial transition alone. In these places, anti-immigrant sentiment is the costume anxiety most often reaches for — not the source of the anxiety itself.
None of this means debates over immigration and integration are meaningless. In places with genuinely large immigrant populations, conflicts over integration policy are a real and pressing political issue. What Saxony-Anhalt demonstrates, though, is that the intensity of anti-immigrant sentiment doesn’t necessarily track the amount of actual contact with immigrants. It tracks something else far more closely: a sense of losing control over one’s own future — precarity itself.
South Korea Is Afraid of Immigrants Who Haven’t Arrived Yet
Mapping this pattern directly onto South Korea calls for caution. South Korea’s migration-background population stood at 2.71 million last year — just 5.2 percent of the total population, lower than Germany’s national average and not far off Saxony-Anhalt’s own figure. And yet that number is growing roughly 50 times faster than the overall population, with more than 60 percent of the increase concentrated among people in their 20s to 40s. South Korea isn’t a society contesting immigrants who have already arrived — it’s one growing anxious, in advance, about immigrants who will inevitably arrive as low birthrates and an aging population make it necessary.
That preemptive anxiety follows the same logic as the German case. Online hostility toward multiculturalism and migrant workers correlates far more strongly with young people’s anxiety over job competition, soaring housing costs, and a narrowing path into the workforce than with any real contact with immigrants. The people actually competing for jobs and apartments are mostly fellow Koreans, but it is psychologically easier to direct frustration at something as concrete as “an influx of foreign workers” than at the diffuse, unnamed pressure of competition itself. Just as voters in Saxony-Anhalt aimed their anger at immigrants who were largely absent from their lives, a segment of South Korea’s youth may already be aiming anxiety about the future at immigrants who have yet to arrive in any significant number.
There is, however, one crucial difference. Europe’s far-right parties made immigration the central axis of political mobilization and turned it into concrete electoral victories. In South Korea, by contrast, the forces driving political polarization have centered not on immigration but on generational and gender conflict, ideological division, and the deepening political rift that followed the martial law crisis of late 2024. In other words, South Korea shares Germany’s emotional soil — anti-immigrant sentiment without immigrants — but that sentiment has not yet organized itself into a clear political force or translated into election results. The open question is whether, as the debate over expanding immigration to offset the birthrate crisis intensifies, the currently scattered resentment online will stay diffuse — or coalesce, as it did in Germany, into an organized political force.
Germany’s Mirror, Korea’s Question
The real question Germany’s election raises isn’t “will the far right rise again.” It’s this: why are voters in economically left-behind regions, and voters who rarely encounter an immigrant in daily life, more easily persuaded by explanations that blame immigrants? The answer likely lies not in immigrant numbers but in time — specifically, the time during which political and economic systems left this anxiety unaddressed, or actively deepened it. The evidence is right there in this election: the “firewall” (Brandmauer) strategy that Germany’s mainstream parties have maintained — refusing to form coalitions or cooperate with AfD in any way — did nothing to stop the party from winning votes. Isolating a party politically cannot, by itself, touch the root causes that lifted that party up in the first place.
What South Korea should take from this mirror is something else. South Korea is not yet at the stage where a German-style firewall becomes necessary — the stage where an anti-immigrant party wins 40-plus percent of the vote and becomes the largest party. But the stage before that — where formless anxiety begins to solidify into sentiment directed at a specific group — may already be underway. The moment when expanding immigration becomes an unavoidable policy response to the birthrate crisis is converging with the moment when young people’s anxiety over jobs and housing is at its sharpest. What Saxony-Anhalt proved is that once a political vessel exists for this sentiment to organize around, it can convert into votes almost overnight, regardless of how many immigrants are actually present. What South Korea needs, before that vessel is built, isn’t a question of which parties ally with or exclude which — it’s addressing the precarity young people feel as a matter of policy, directly.
