[Editor’s note: The results of a September 6 state election in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt represented a political earthquake and may, in hindsight, be viewed as a turning point in the nation’s politics. The length — and format — of what follows is an effort to accord this story the attention it deserves. I hope you enjoy.]

I / Pool rules

 

“Here, use this.” He sent a link through Google Hangouts, not exactly the best forum for conducting an around-the-clock, foreign influence operation, but maybe that’s not what we were doing. I still don’t know for sure. And never will.

I clicked on the link. It was a German-language pool etiquette cartoon strip. “Lol,” I typed back. “Wtf?” I was still young enough then to traffic in the juvenile initialisms that define 21st century digital “discourse.”

“It’s for the migrants,” he told me. I was dubious. One of the frames depicted a woman in a bikini, along with a prohibition symbol (the red circle with a diagonal stripe) over an open hand. “No verbal or physical sexual harassment of women,” the caption read. “Regardless of what they are wearing.”

“Why is the hand white?” I wondered. His typing dots appeared. Then disappeared. Then reappeared. Then disappeared again. He didn’t have an answer. I tried again: “You’d think the hand would be brown, no? Or are they just trying to be politically correct?”

I wrote the story anyway, which is to say without knowing whether the pool rules cartoon was actually drawn up in response to the influx of migrants which by then constituted the most acute political flashpoint of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship. I don’t remember how I framed the piece, but knowing how we operated, I surely didn’t lead with an caveats alluding to the possibility that the advisory predated the refugee crisis.

As The Independent later reported, the German pool etiquette guide was in fact created more than two years previous. It wasn’t related (in any cause and effect sense) to the infamous New Year’s Eve assaults in Cologne, nor to the sexual harassment complaints which led nearby Bornheim to institute a controversial pool ban on male asylum seekers in January of 2016.

Our editorial stance as it related to the refugee crisis — trafficking in thinly-veiled xenophobia for the purposes of exacerbating social fissures in European democracies — was bad enough. But the willingness to employ lies to make a case that was well-enough supported by facts was too much to bear even for me, a man not famous for moral rectitude.

II / Shocked I tell you

 

“Yesterday marked a turning point,” a dejected Friedrich Merz said, on September 7. “I am deeply shocked.”

A day earlier, the far-right Alternative for Germany scored a resounding electoral victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, the party’s power center.

“This election will have consequences,” Merz sighed, lamenting the results, which very nearly handed AfD an absolute majority in the state. Such an outcome, The New York Times grimly remarked, would’ve made it “the first far-right party to govern part of Germany since the Nazi era.”

The threshold for an absolute majority in the local legislature was 42 seats. As the figure below shows, AfD ran up 39. They were that close.

AfD still had a chance to govern in the event The “Brandmauer” — Germany’s version of France’s “cordon sanitaire” — didn’t hold during the coalition-building process. Party co-leader Tino Chrupalla has repeatedly characterized the de facto ban on cooperation with AfD as anachronistic and self-defeating. “Anyone who erects firewalls will get grilled behind them,” as he once put it.

To be sure, a strong performance from AfD in Saxony-Anhalt was a foregone conclusion. But they handily outperformed even their own high expectations with almost 44% of the vote on September 6. That came at the direct expense of Merz’s Christian Democrats, whose share halved to just 17%, leaving a hopelessly unpopular chancellor to ponder “the heaviest electoral defeat the CDU has suffered in years — in decades.”

AfD, you’re reminded, was branded an extremist group in 2025 by Germany’s own domestic intelligence agency. “Many statements by the AfD reflect an understanding of the nation based on ethnicity and ancestry, contradict[ing] the understanding of the nation enshrined in Germany’s Basic Law,” the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which sits under the Interior Ministry, said, in the 2025 vintage of its annual report.

The BfV, which is responsible for monitoring threats to Germany’s democratic order, went on to flag AfD’s affinity for sundry versions of the “Great Replacement” theory, which “plays a key role in the party’s agitation.” “Furthermore,” the report said, the party continues to traffic in “views hostile to foreigners and Muslims.”

AfD challenged the extremist designation, eventually winning an injunction from an administrative court in Cologne, which ordered the label temporarily removed, even as it left in place a “suspected extremist” designation dating to 2021.

In his infamous address to the Munich Security Conference last year, JD Vance chided Berlin for ostracizing AfD. “German democracy [will not] survive telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered,” he said.

Vance didn’t mention the party by name, but he didn’t have to. The implication was clear. Just in case, he presumed to instruct the Germans on how to run a democracy. “There is no room for firewalls,” Vance scolded.

Three months later, Marco Rubio decried the BfV’s extremist designation. “What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD,” he sneered, on social media. “But rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes.”

III / The craft

 

Rubio’s snide rebuke of Germany’s efforts to keep the AfD from power could’ve walked right out of something I penned a decade previous during my short stint as a member of the triumvirate running editorial for what, to this day, remains the most widely-read macro-market blog on Earth.

Indeed, there’s a sense in which Rubio’s comment did walk right out of my 2015-era propagandizing, the same way Tulsi Gabbard often seemed, that year and thereafter, to be reading from a geopolitical script I played a very small role in penning.

The creation and promulgation of agitprop is an art. A dark one, sure, but an art nonetheless. The Kremlin’s arm’s-length global propaganda network, which in many instances works at several levels of remove from The GRU and rarely “phones home,” so to speak, mastered that art a long time ago.

There are two main elements to the craft, and they’re complimentary. One centers on exploiting real (which is to say preexisting) fissures within Western democracies by amplifying the most extreme arguments on both sides of a given social debate. The goal is to maximize polarization such that rifts become ravines.

The second element entails inserting counter-narrative (which is to say disinformation or even outright falsehoods) into the fray to sow confusion, distrust and paranoia, or simply to inflame tensions further.

The success of any foreign influence campaign is measured not just by what it achieves, but by the extent to which it meets its goals without leaving its victims any wiser. I described the process two years ago in “Dances With Wolves.” To wit,

Disinformation and counter-narrative spread like a virus. The narratives ricochet, echo and reverberate through “likes,” re-posts and other social media interactions such that it quickly becomes impossible to trace the source. The most successful such campaigns involve very little direct amplification by the originating, state-linked entity, and as such become almost organic.

That’s the craft. And when it works, there’s something almost beautiful about its malevolence.

Europe’s refugee crisis was eminently exploitable. Every real instance of a transgression — minor or murderous — committed by a male, Muslim newly-arrived in a white, Christian society was an opportunity. For long-marginalized right-wing politicians, yes. But also for Moscow, which saw in the migrant melee a chance to destabilize US-aligned democracies (read: NATO members) by framing the chaos as an indictment of the post-Soviet neoliberal consensus.

AfD wasn’t even two years old in 2015. Although I was given no explicit directive to raise the party’s profile, adhering to our (also unspoken) editorial mandate meant amplifying AfD’s messaging. Suffice to say I was penning AfD propaganda before most people outside of Germany even knew the party existed.

It’s not that we were ourselves xenophobic. The three of us couldn’t have cared less about the racial “purity” of Western Europe. Rather, the point was to inflame tensions such that Merkel’s open-door policy appeared that much more misguided, and indeed such that any accommodative position on the crisis in any country appeared increasingly untenable. The same project found me regularly promoting Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage and so on.

It’d be too much to say I would’ve felt better about the situation had we actually, the three of us, believed ourselves in the message we were implicitly pushing. But if we had — if we were actually xenophobes — at least we would’ve been honest.

The most alarming aspect of the whole sordid endeavor was the credulity on display not so much among the voting public (that was to be expected), but among so many political entrepreneurs who proved unable to distinguish between real news that supported their positions (of which there was no shortage) and disinformation.

At first I assumed they just didn’t care. But it became quickly (and readily) apparent that in fact, many of the politicians at the forefront of Europe’s rightward lurch in 2015 were genuinely unapprised of the possibility they were being co-opted by the multiple, overlapping Kremlin influence campaigns running at the time.

In the 2024 piece quoted above, I cited Ian Garner, a historian and translator of Russian war propaganda. The West, he wrote for Foreign Policy that year, “is still oblivious” to what actually befell it since 2014. Propaganda’s nothing new for Russia. What is new, Garner emphasized, “is a polarized Western public’s enthusiasm for re-centering its own identity around Moscow’s narratives — and becoming an unwitting weapon in the information war.”

I’m reminded of a particularly haunting scene from Ridley Scott’s original Alien. “You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you?” Ash, a rogue android hiding a secret, asks Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. “The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.”

IV / To Russia with love

 

In the decade since my drunken falling out with a man who would’ve made me a lot richer than I am today, right-wing populism went from fringe to mainstream, and now commands a plurality of popular support across many Western democracies.

The AfD seems destined for some kind of power in Germany, despite the cartoonishly macabre optics. No one wants the dubious distinction of being the first party to partner up with the far-right since a failed artist with a stimulant problem tried to take over the world, murdering six million people in the process.

But the party’s support at the national level is approaching 30%, according to Forsa. As the figure below shows, that’s quintuple levels from 2015, when I was busy extolling the supposed virtues of a platform the German foreign ministry would brand with the extremist label if only the courts would let it.

CDU, by contrast, has seen its popular support plummet from north of 40% in 2015 to just over 20% today.

As Vance and Rubio forcefully noted last year, it’s difficult to deny to AfD an opportunity to govern when the party’s leading in national polls. And trouncing the establishment in state elections. Sven Schulze, Saxony-Anhalt’s outgoing CDU premier, conceded as much. “We are the opposition,” he said Monday. “The mandate to govern now lies with the AfD.”

AfD’s Chrupalla and co-leader Alice Weidel will tell you that’s democracy. Vance and Rubio would say the same. But are democratic outcomes facilitated, even in part, by the external weaponization of a country’s internal rifts truly democratic? Is a nation turned against itself by an outside actor capable of reaching a democratic consensus? What if that consensus is as likely as not to lead the country to ruin?

Germany’s not alone in grappling with those questions. France, the UK and, of course, the US, are all similarly situated: The much-maligned “establishment” claims for itself a paternalistic duty to deny the popular will, ironically in the name of safeguarding democracy.

The internal contradiction in such claims isn’t lost on voters, which goes a long way towards explaining why Donald Trump ended up back in the Oval Office. And why any decision in France to disallow Le Pen from seeking the presidency again in 2027 (she faced a five-year political ban in connection with an embezzlement conviction) risked backfiring.

All of this is of course a historic coup for the Kremlin where, had he not saddled himself with an unwinnable quagmire in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin would be enjoying a perennial windfall from modern history’s most successful disinformation campaign.

The saving grace for Moscow is that if AfD does end up in power in Germany and Le Pen in France, support for Kyiv would falter in Berlin and Paris. Just as it did in Washington when Trump retook office last year.

As Bloomberg’s James Hertling wrote this week, the AfD’s resounding win in Saxony-Anhalt “marked a milestone not just for the far-right but for Europe’s tilt toward Vladimir Putin.”

Merz voiced similar concerns. “I want to make this very clear,” he said on September 7. “2,500 kilometres east of here, people are especially delighted with [the Saxony-Anhalt] election result.”

V / The misfit

 

“How are you liking it so far?”

It was April of 2015. Or early May, maybe. I’d been on the job for less than two months. He was impressed with my performance, or surprised that I was keeping up. Both.

“I love it!” I effused, texting with one hand and pushing open the door to the parking garage under the Monarch building at Ridge Hill, in Yonkers, with the other. I was on my way to the liquor store. Or Stew Leonard’s. Both. “Best job I’ve ever had.”

And I did love it. Mostly because, for the first time since my glory days cosplaying Boston George, I was involved in an all-cash business with an air of danger. In addition to putting me back on my feet after I crashed out of a Manhattan nine-to-five, he helped me recapture some of the adrenaline that went along with my old businesses.

“Great,” he texted back. “You’re going to fit right in.”

But I didn’t. Fit right in. I’d been a lot of things in my then 32 years, and I was fully prepared to be a lot of other things. But not that. Whatever that was.

A few days ago, I stumbled on responses to an exit question I didn’t know I was asking. Apparently, when you cancel your Heisenberg Report subscription, you’re invited to give a reason. That was news to me, as is a lot of what my developers implement in the interest of keeping the site modern.

One subscriber who hit the exit last year complained about my admission that I’ve never voted in an election. “Now I realize you’re just a nihilist with a closet full of regrets,” he said. “You’re not wrong,” I thought, with a chuckle.

He wasn’t finished. “I guess you’re not helping Pravda with propaganda any more, so at least your passive evil is reduced,” he carried on. “[But] I’m sure you cashed the check.”

I sure did. Cash that check. And I’ve spent every day since making sure they regret having written it.

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