The September elections turn Germany’s Brandmauer from a coalition convention into a question of state capacity. On 6 September 2026, the AfD won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt and 39 of 83 seats; on 20 September, it won 38.2% in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and 32 of 71 seats. Berlin moved differently on the same day: Die Linke won 25.7%, while the AfD reached 16.3%. The pattern is therefore not a uniform rightward wave but a hollowing-out and polarisation of the political center. This matters because Germany’s political conflict is increasingly also about who controls compute, energy, platforms, data, digital identity, cybersecurity and autonomous weapons. Brandmauer, meaning ‘firewall ’, is a traditional defense mechanism of the German political establishment aiming to exclude “extremist” political movements, especially the far-right. The exclusion can still deny AfD executive office, but it no longer prevents agenda-setting. Politically, the danger for the center is that increasingly complicated anti-AfD governing arrangements may protect formal boundaries while failing to demonstrate superior administrative and economic performance.
AfD’s Selective Techno-Nationalism
AfD’s technology agenda is more substantive than a protest-party label suggests. In Bundestag motions debated in June 2026, AfD demanded that Germany move to the “digital world top,” couple data-center strategy to cheap baseload energy, expand capabilities in AI, semiconductors, cloud, quantum communications and high-performance computing, and create a publicly coordinated European AI project modeled on Airbus, ESA or CERN. At the same time, it called for an 80% reduction in EU bureaucracy. Its energy prescription included restarting nuclear power, abandoning the coal exit and lifting sanctions affecting Russian oil and gas.
A separate AfD initiative sought to halt Germany’s implementation of the EU’s digital-identity wallet and substitute a voluntary national wallet limited primarily to dealings with public authorities, while preserving analog alternatives. The party also voted against Germany’s June 2026 legislation implementing the EU AI Act, arguing that the framework lacked lean, business-friendly structures and could leave Europe behind the United States and China.
Selective techno-nationalism occurs by being strongly pro-technology and pro-industrial policy, occasionally supportive of European technological coordination, but hostile to supranational governance when it constrains national discretion. That tension is reinforced by energy geopolitics. Reuters reported on 18 September that AfD leaders and Vladimir Putin’s economic envoy were preparing possible 2027 talks on restoring Russian gas supplies. Cheap energy may lower industrial and compute costs, but renewed strategic reliance on an adversarial supplier would sit uneasily with the party’s own language of technological sovereignty.
The clearest documented contact between AfD and what might be called a “techno-feudal lord” is Elon Musk. Before Germany’s 2025 federal election, Musk publicly endorsed AfD and hosted Alice Weidel on X. German civil-society organizations subsequently sued X seeking election-relevant platform data under the Digital Services Act, while the European Commission intensified scrutiny of X’s recommender system. The techno-feudal lens, however, should not be reduced to AfD. It describes a systemic problem in which private owners of platforms, clouds, AI models, app stores and other infrastructural layers acquire quasi-public powers through algorithmic ranking, access rules, data accumulation and technological lock-in. The EU’s Digital Markets Act currently designates 23 core platform services as gatekeeper services. Meanwhile, a Commission sovereign-cloud procurement framework launched in 2026 allows up to €180 million in procurement over six years and explicitly seeks supplier diversification and lower lock-in. The European dilemma is therefore that regulation must constrain private infrastructural power, but compliance cannot become so fragmented and expensive that only the largest incumbent technology firms possess the legal, computational and financial resources to satisfy it.
Infrastructural Power, Regulation and Europe’s Capability Gap
Germany remains comparatively strong in fields such as semiconductors and quantum technology within the boundaries of Europe, yet the Commission’s 2026 Digital Decade assessment says Europe’s largest economy still needs better connectivity and more effective digital public services. Across the EU, 46.7% of enterprises use cloud computing, 39.9% use data analytics and roughly 20% use AI. The Commission’s June 2026 technological-sovereignty package covering Chips Act 2.0, cloud and AI capacity, and an open-source strategy implicitly recognizes that Europe’s problem is industrial and infrastructural, not simply regulatory.
Data governance forms another part of this sovereignty problem. The EU Data Act, applicable since September 2025, seeks to make industrial and connected-device data more accessible, increase interoperability and make switching between cloud providers easier; it complements the Data Governance Act and the wider project of common European data spaces. Yet rules only create strategic value when firms and administrations possess the technical capability to implement them. Cybersecurity adds further urgency. The Commission warned in July 2026 that advanced AI can strengthen cyber defense but can also accelerate vulnerability discovery, automate attacks and increase their scale. Europe therefore has to build model-evaluation, cyber-defense and regulatory capacity simultaneously. Digital sovereignty should mean resilient alternatives, interoperable standards, skilled labor, secure infrastructure and procurement that prevents lock-in, not digital autarky.
Defense Technologies and Competing Geographies of Security
The same transformation is visible in defense. Germany’s draft 2027 defense expenditure reaches €139.6 billion, including more than €60 billion for military procurement, compared with €45 billion planned for procurement in 2026. Germany is also moving toward software- and autonomy-intensive weapons: a planned €536 million order from German start-ups Helsing and Stark Defence covers loitering strike drones and forms part of a larger €4.3 billion framework. At EU level, the SAFE instrument provides up to €150 billion in loans for joint defense procurement, designed to strengthen the European defense technological and industrial base and reduce fragmentation; it sits within the broader Readiness 2030 framework.
Within the framework of defense again, the Commission’s July 2026 advanced-AI cybersecurity plan explicitly warns that frontier AI can both strengthen defense and enable attackers to find vulnerabilities, automate attacks and increase their speed and scale. Strategic autonomy therefore cannot be reduced to where physical weapons are assembled. It increasingly means control of software stacks, training data, cloud environments, communications infrastructure, semiconductors and cyber expertise. Here the AfD position contains another revealing split. In January 2026, the party demanded an end to German weapons and military-equipment deliveries to Ukraine.
Yet immediately after the Saxony-Anhalt election, Ulrich Siegmund, the winner of the Saxony-Anhalt elections nominated by the AfD despite possibly not being able to become chancellor, indicated that the party was not opposed to arms manufacturing per se when production served national defense or domestic security. His comments came amid discussion of a possible Elbit Systems investment in Sangerhausen and explicitly connected military-industrial resources with the party’s domestic deportation agenda. That difference is fundamental. The AfD’s position is not technological pacifism; it implies a different political geography of coercive technology. The federal government and most of the pro-European mainstream conceive rearmament through NATO, Ukraine support, joint European procurement and continental strategic autonomy. The AfD is more inclined to legitimate advanced security technology when it reinforces nationally defined borders, sovereignty and internal-order priorities.
This creates a new political economy in which venture-backed AI companies, drone producers and traditional defense primes compete to become strategic infrastructure providers. The opportunity is faster innovation, stronger European supply chains and reduced dependence on non-European technology. The danger is a military form of platform lock-in: proprietary software, closed architectures and privately controlled sensor data can create decades-long dependencies. Procurement policy should therefore reward interoperability, auditable AI, European supply-chain depth and genuine multi-vendor competition while keeping national-security exemptions subject to democratic oversight.
The September elections demonstrate why the Brandmauer cannot be Germany’s only democratic technology policy. AfD is gaining where voters associate the existing order with high costs, administrative friction and strategic dependence. Mainstream parties consequently need a material technopolitical answer: faster digital government, secure and competitive energy for compute and industry, European cloud and AI capacity, stronger data and cyber infrastructure, and defense procurement that produces capabilities rather than protected rents. The EU’s current sovereignty, data, competition and defense initiatives provide pieces of such an answer, but their credibility depends on implementation. The counter to techno-feudalism is neither regulation alone nor nationalist sovereignty rhetoric. It is about enforceable platform rules, transparency when algorithms affect public interests, public-interest digital infrastructure, competitive procurement, open standards, privacy-preserving identity and alliances large enough to prevent US technology oligopolies, Chinese state-linked ecosystems or Russian energy leverage from becoming Germany’s default infrastructure. In that sense, the firewall will hold only if the democratic center can build.
Ege Barış Kanık is a PhD candidate in International Security. His research interests include cultural history, Byzantine and Russian history, and Ancient Greek. This article is part of Kanık’s ongoing Techno-Politics and Cultural History series, published periodically in TeknoPolitika.
