One in Four Germans Now Wants an Authoritarian Nationalist Government. The Trend Line Is Accelerating.

Leipzig's biennial authoritarianism study shows democratic satisfaction at historic lows, far-right worldviews at decade highs, and antisemitism doubling since 2022. The east-west gap is narrowing — in the wrong direction.

The Leipzig Authoritarianism Study, conducted every two years since 2002 by the Else Frenkel-Brunswik Institute for Democracy Research, has recorded its bleakest results yet. For the first time in the series, approval of democracy as an idea fell below 90%. Satisfaction with democracy as actually experienced sits at roughly one-third nationwide — 22.8% in the east, 36% in the west. These are not numbers that describe a legitimacy crisis on the horizon. They describe one already underway.

The headline finding is structural: 22.3% of respondents explicitly endorsed a 'single strong party that embodies the national community as a whole.' In the former East Germany, that figure is 30.9%. This is not a fringe position. It is a quarter of the population expressing preference for a system incompatible with liberal democracy. Chauvinistic national pride hit 19.9% — its highest recorded level. The share holding a consistently far-right worldview reached 6.9%, the highest since 2014. The appetite for destruction is not metaphorical. Nearly 15% of respondents explicitly believe 'everything has to fall apart so that something new can emerge.' Nearly one in three says 'something radical is needed.' Another 29.1% partially agree. That is a majority of the population expressing some degree of comfort with systemic rupture. The study links this catastrophism to both antisemitic sentiment and AfD support, identifying the far-right party as the political vehicle that 'promises to realize the political goals of far-right ideology.' Antisemitism has more than doubled since 2022. A record 16% say Israel's government policies are the decisive factor behind their antisemitic attitudes — a framing that collapses a geopolitical position into ethnic hostility. The east-west gap on Israel-related antisemitism has converged, with western states now slightly higher. Hostility toward Muslims stands at 34.1%, recovering from a dip below 30% after peaking above 40% in 2018. One genuinely surprising finding: anti-feminist sentiment in the east has halved in two years, dropping from 34.6% to 17.8%, while the west barely moved (19.6% to 18.4%). The east-west gap on misogyny has effectively closed. The researchers offer no clear explanation for this rapid shift, and it stands as the only data point moving decisively against the authoritarian trend. The study's 900-respondent sample is modest but consistent with its 23-year methodology, and the researchers note that earlier spikes in far-right sentiment did reverse in subsequent waves. The implied message: these numbers are alarming but not necessarily permanent. Political action and its public perception have historically mattered. The question is whether German institutions can generate the kind of democratic response that previous reversals required — when the institutions themselves are what a quarter of the population has lost faith in. The AfD's role here is not incidental. The study explicitly identifies the party as the organizational expression of authoritarian desire — not creating the demand but channeling it. This is the classical dynamic of democratic erosion: a party that is formally democratic but substantively anti-democratic, operating within institutions it aims to hollow out. Germany has seen this before. The question is whether the antibodies developed from that history still function at sufficient strength.