The Polish Right has responded with a degree of ambivalence to the September 6 state election victory by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Saxony-Anhalt, despite the fact that a part of Poland’s Confederation party sits with the AfD in the Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN) grouping in the European Parliament (EP).
The AfD’s victory was welcomed by some figures from Poland’s most right-wing party. “Germany is waking up,” tweeted Jacek Wilk, a former member of Poland’s parliament who is now a prominent member of the Polish Crown party which is led by Grzegorz Braun MEP, a politician who has not been allowed to sit in any of the three right-wing EP groupings for his allegedly anti-Semitic views.
MEPs from the libertarian wing of Poland’s Confederation party sit in the ESN while Confederation MEPs from the nationalist wing sit in the Patriots for Europe grouping in which Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Hungary’s former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán are leading lights.
The leader of the libertarian wing of the Confederation party Sławomir Mentzen has not been forthcoming on the result in Germany, with Polish media reporting on September 7 that he had yet to comment on it publicly.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who leads Poland’s ruling centre-left government, was quick to latch on to statements at least in some ways welcoming the AfD victory and condemned as “idiots or traitors” those among the right-wing opposition who have celebrated it, saying they were working in the interests of Russia and Putin. He named PiS and both Confederation groupings in the same post, and on September 7 described the AfD as “openly pro-Russian and anti-Polish”.
On September 6, responding to Tusk’s post, AfD MEP Tomasz Froelich, who holds both German and Polish citizenship, wrote: “Herr Tusk, eat a Snickers!”, a reference to an advertising campaign for the chocolate bar suggesting that people should eat one when they need to calm down.
But Tusk won’t mind. Ahead of Poland’s 2027 election, he is trying to turn the victory of a nationalist German party against his opponents. Tying their enthusiasm to the AfD’s Russia-friendly stance lets him challenge their claim to defend Polish interests.
The rise of the AfD in Germany is being watched with concern by most parties in Poland because of that party’s line on downplaying the importance of Germany’s Nazi past, its sympathy towards President Vladimir Putin’s Russia and views perceived to be anti-Polish.
Some senior AfD figures have sought to downplay the significance of the Nazi era.
On December 3, 2025, when the German parliament approved plans for a memorial in Berlin to Polish victims of the Second World War, the AfD was the only group not to vote in favour, most of its members abstaining and two voting against.
AfD joint leader Tino Chrupalla said in November 2025 that he does not see any current threat to Germany from Russia, whereas “Poland could be a threat to us”. He tied the remark to a Warsaw court’s refusal to extradite a suspect wanted in Germany over the Nord Stream explosions.
In January 2026, Kay Gottschalk, the AfD’s finance spokesman in the Bundestag and one of its founders, called on Poland to pay his country €1.3 trillion in reparations for alleged “complicity” in the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines bringing gas from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea that were damaged in explosions in 2022. The sum matches the one Warsaw has itself demanded from Berlin for Second World War damage.
Law and Justice (PiS), Poland’s largest right-wing opposition grouping, and the right-wing opposition aligned President Karol Nawrocki expressed fears rather than enthusiasm with regard to the result in Saxony-Anhalt.
Former education minister and current MEP Anna Zalewska said that “the AfD is a powerful threat to European values and Polish-German cooperation”.
President Nawrocki’s senior aide Paweł Szefernaker said that the AfD’s views on history and Russia were “unacceptable”.
Szefernaker told YouTube broadcaster Kanał Zero that “the AfD is pursuing a programme that is contrary to Poland’s interests. The AfD’s pro-Russian agenda, such as the proposal to lift sanctions against Russia, is dangerous and unacceptable from Poland’s perspective.”
Though he also argued that the AfD’s rise has been the result of a backlash against policies previously implemented by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel as well as by Tusk himself when he served as President of the European Council.
Former PiS MEP Zdzisław Krasnodębski, now a member of the president’s Council for a New Constitution, took a more nuanced approach, calling on the CDU to end the anti-democratic “firewall” policy under which all mainstream German parties refuse any participation in administrations with AfD participation, adding that the 77.8 per cent turnout in Saxony-Anhalt should be seen as “a great celebration of democracy”.
Poland’s Right has been suspicious of German power, fearing its dominance in the EU. That has concentrated on the way the German Left has been moving for ever-closer union, but it is also true of the German Right, whom it suspects of revanchism and a wish to review Poland’s territorial gains at the end of the Second World War.
Poland’s Right will note that the AfD is as opposed, if not more so, to the idea of reparations for Poland for Second World War damage and that the party is rather inclined to the view expressed in 2025 by Elon Musk who urged Germans to stop apologising for the past.
All sides of the Polish political spectrum recognise the importance of Germany with regard to the Polish economy. Germany is Poland’s largest export market, taking just under 27 per cent of Polish exports in 2025, according to the country’s statistics office GUS.
Neither Tusk nor PiS would welcome an AfD government leaving Schengen, something the joint leader of the party Alice Weidel has promised to do. Such a move is seen in Poland as a threat to cross-border movement which could add delays and costs for Polish business.
The Polish Right is also concerned about Germany’s rise in military spending. On the one hand it welcomes the German contribution to NATO and its eastern flank and does not have a problem with Germany’s military aid for Ukraine whom it wants to resist Russia, but on the other it fears what German military power could mean in the future.
This has been articulated by PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński who has warned that in the course of history German military power has rarely been used to Poland’s advantage.
The AfD’s strong preference for a closer relationship with Putin’s Russia, on whom it wants sanctions lifted, and ambivalence towards Ukraine is seen as being contrary to Poland’s national interest by both PiS and the present Tusk government.
The Polish parties of the Right, PiS, Confederation and the Polish Crown, as well as former PiS Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s breakaway Development + grouping, are all close to Poland’s Catholic Church and far more socially conservative than the AfD. It would be very hard to imagine any of them being led by someone like Alice Weidel, who is living in a same-sex union.
