Germany offers a warning for Europe ahead of 2027 election year: the Putin/Trump security crisis won’t necessarily save the political centre

Europe is heading into a consequential election year in 2027. Voters are due to go to the polls in France, Spain, Poland and Italy, at a moment when the continent’s security environment is becoming more precarious.

The war in Ukraine continues, Donald Trump’s war with Iran has added another source of instability, and Washington is increasingly stepping back from European security.

Europeans have noticed: recent polling finds that 68 percent believe their country is under threat , while defence and security now rank among their foremost concerns about the future .

Mainstream parties might assume that this new age of insecurity will work in their favour. Traditional theories of international relations give them some reason to think so. When external threats grow, voters should place greater value on governing experience, foreign-policy expertise and defence competence.

Established parties should therefore enjoy what we might call a security dividend: as the world becomes more dangerous, voters return to parties they trust to manage it.

But recent German regional elections suggest there is a catch. A striking illustration of this is the rise of the Alternative for Germany.

On Sunday more than 38 percent of voters in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern voted for the AfD. Two weeks earlier, 43.8 percent of voters in Saxony-Anhalt supported this party.

Meanwhile, chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats recorded some of their worst-ever results, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern it didn’t even meet the five-percent hurdle to enter the state parliament.

Regional setbacks for the party of the chancellor are hardly unusual in Germany, but the extent of the AfD’s gains despite its positions towards Russia is striking at a time when security has moved to the heart of European public debate.

If Europe’s security environment continues to deteriorate as voters head to the polls in 2027, mainstream leaders should not assume that geopolitics will do the political work of containing the far -right for them.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, politicians and pundits expected an electoral reckoning.

During the 2022 French presidential campaign, Emmanuel Macron attacked Marine Le Pen over her links to Russia , arguing that her dependence on Vladimir Putin compromised her ability to defend French interests.

Gilles Ivaldi, a populism expert at Sciences Po, argued that “far-right parties have lost legitimacy” due to their ties to Russia . New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wondered whether the invasion might mark the end of the populist era , predicting an embarrassment for populist leaders who had spent years admiring Putin.

The recent win by the AfD in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has not borne out such fears.

The AfD has long advocated a more Russia-friendly course, opposing sanctions on Moscow and German military support for Ukraine, but voters were largely undeterred.

This pattern is far from Germany-specific. Rather than declining after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the far-right’s average vote share rose from around 13 percent in 2021 to almost 20 percent last year.

So, why has far-right support in Europe remained so resilient in light of growing concerns about Europe's security?

In a recent study , my co-authors (Ala’ Alrababah at Bocconi University and Rachel Myrick at Duke University) and I try to found out.

In a survey, we assign German respondents to read either an apolitical scenario or a hypothetical security threat scenario in which Donald Trump had withdrawn US support from Nato, effectively collapsing the alliance, and Russian troops invaded Estonia, an EU and Nato member.

Being exposed to this threat scenario clearly changed what German respondents wanted from politicians. They became more supportive of defence spending, European defence cooperation and placed greater weight on foreign-policy experience, judgement and defence competence.

Those changing priorities also affected their party support.

Support for Merz's CDU/CSU increased by 4.4 percentage points. On its face, this looks like the conventional story. Faced with a security threat, voters support the prime minister's party with long-term experience in defence and security.

Except that support for the AfD did not decline. The CDU’s gains came primarily from mainstream voters who previous supported the liberal FDP, social democrats or Greens. AfD voters barely moved. What we observed was a rally within the centre, not a rally away from the extremes.

The resilience of AfD support was particularly striking. Roughly 96 percent of previous AfD voters remained loyal to their party.

This was not because they were indifferent to security. AfD voters responded to the threat scenario as well. Their views on defence spending, leadership priorities and foreign-policy competence shifted in broadly similar ways to those of other voters. Their policy priorities changed, but their party preference did not.

Germany therefore offers a warning for Europe as it approaches its 2027 election year. A more security-conscious electorate is not necessarily a more centrist one.

That means Europe could enter 2027 with two developments occurring simultaneously: voters demanding stronger defence and greater protection from external threats, while parties that have questioned sanctions on Russia, military support for Ukraine or deeper European security cooperation continue to command substantial electoral support.

The political consequence is important. Mainstream parties cannot rely on a security dividend to contain the far-right. If they want voters to move back from the political extremes, they will have to give them reasons to do so.

Catherine De Vries is professor and vice-dean at IE School of Politics, Economics and Global Affairs, and chair of the Political Science and International Relations Department, IE University. She is also the co-author, among other books, of Political Entrepreneurship: The Rise of Challenger Parties in Europe. (Princeton University Press, 2020).