The question matters because the latest German state elections have produced something more interesting than a simple swing to the right. They reveal a political centre being challenged from opposite directions.
In Saxony-Anhalt, the Alternative für Deutschland won 43.8 per cent of the party-list vote, an increase of 23 percentage points from the previous election. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the AfD secured 38.2 per cent, compared with 18 per cent previously. Yet in Berlin, on the same weekend as the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern election, the movement was very different. Die Linke doubled its previous share and became the largest party with 25.7 per cent.
These are different states with different histories, economies and electorates, so they should not be treated as one national opinion poll. Nevertheless, together they reveal something worth studying.
Germany is not simply moving right. Parts of Germany are moving strongly towards the populist right while its largest city has moved towards the left.
Britain should pay attention.
Reform UK is not the AfD, the British Greens are not Die Linke, and Britain’s political institutions are different from Germany’s. Direct comparisons would therefore be misleading. But some of the pressures behind political fragmentation are recognisable: immigration, the cost of living, energy, war, defence expenditure, strained public services, economic insecurity and declining confidence that traditional parties can solve these problems.
For Andy Burnham, the German experience raises a particularly difficult question. What happens when a government responds to an issue but the opposition continues to own the political narrative around it?
Immigration illustrates the problem.
Governments can tighten immigration policy and immigration can actually fall, yet public concern does not necessarily disappear.
That is already visible in Britain. According to the Office for National Statistics, long-term net migration fell to approximately 171,000 in the year ending December 2025, from 331,000 the previous year. It has fallen dramatically from the estimated peak of 944,000 in the year ending March 2023. Immigration of non-EU nationals for work-related reasons fell by 47 per cent during 2025.
Those are substantial changes.
Yet the political debate does not sound as though net migration has fallen by more than three quarters from its peak.
This is where I use the word propaganda carefully. I do not mean that concerns about immigration are invented, nor that governments should dismiss them as prejudice. There are legitimate questions about the level of immigration a country can accommodate, housing, public services, employment, integration, crime, asylum decisions and the fairness of access to a welfare system financed collectively by society.
What concerns me is the gap that can develop between an underlying problem and the political narrative constructed around it.
If a government merely repeats that immigration has fallen, while people believe that the consequences of previous immigration remain unresolved, statistics alone will not win the argument.
The answer cannot simply be to imitate the language of the political right. Germany demonstrates the danger of that approach. A mainstream government can move towards tougher immigration policies without necessarily removing the issue from parties whose political identity has been built around immigration.
A more durable response requires two things at the same time: control and integration.
There should be proper due diligence when asylum and refugee status are determined. Fraud and abuse of immigration and welfare systems should be investigated. Criminal offences should be dealt with consistently under the law, irrespective of nationality, with immigration consequences considered where legislation permits them.
But once somebody has been lawfully granted the right to remain, integration should become an equally serious government responsibility.
English language ability matters. Understanding British civic institutions, laws and culture matters. Employment matters. Participation in the wider community matters. Integration should not mean abandoning someone’s heritage, religion or identity. It should mean acquiring the ability and willingness to participate in the society in which one has chosen, or been permitted, to build a life.
There is an equally important danger on the other side.
A government attempting to answer Reform UK by compromising the lawful rights of refugees would create political space for opposition from the left. Human rights, due process and Britain’s international obligations cannot become disposable simply because immigration has become politically difficult.
This is perhaps the first German lesson. If the centre merely follows the right, it can strengthen the right while simultaneously losing voters to the left.
The second lesson concerns energy and foreign policy.
Germany entered the Ukraine war with an economic vulnerability Britain did not share to the same extent: substantial dependence on Russian energy, particularly natural gas.
The end of the old energy relationship with Russia, together with the wider consequences of the war and other factors affecting European energy markets, imposed significant adjustment costs on German households and industry. Energy-intensive manufacturing was particularly exposed.
The AfD has used this relationship between foreign policy and domestic economics politically. It has opposed military support for Ukraine, advocated a different relationship with Moscow and presented negotiations and restored economic relations with Russia as alternatives to the policies pursued by mainstream German parties.
One does not have to agree with the AfD’s interpretation to understand why the argument can appeal to some voters.
Foreign policy becomes domestic policy when it reaches the household electricity bill, the factory floor and people’s employment.
Britain’s position is different. The UK was not dependent on Russian gas to the degree Germany was, and it would be misleading to suggest otherwise.
But Britain has its own version of the energy argument.
The conflict involving the United States, Israel and Iran has again demonstrated how geopolitical instability can transmit itself into international oil and gas markets. The British Government itself acknowledges that the largest driver of energy prices for households and businesses remains wholesale gas prices determined internationally.
This creates an interesting political contest.
The Government argues that greater reliance on clean, domestically produced energy will reduce Britain’s long-term exposure to volatile international fossil-fuel markets. That is a rational energy-security argument, not simply an environmental one.
On the other side, supporters of further North Sea development argue that Britain should exploit more of its own oil and gas rather than restricting domestic production.
Here again the facts matter.
The Government estimates that the UK accounts for less than 0.7 per cent of global oil and gas production and argues that additional exploration would therefore have little influence over internationally determined prices. That does not mean North Sea production is economically irrelevant. It supports employment, investment and domestic supply. It does mean that the claim that Britain can substantially determine global oil and gas prices by issuing more licences deserves careful scrutiny.
A long-term clean-energy strategy may therefore be economically sensible, but a twenty-year strategy cannot answer a household asking what happens to its energy bill next winter.
That communication gap is precisely where political narratives grow.
Britain’s deteriorating diplomatic relationship with Russia deserves similar attention.
Russia ended Andrey Kelin’s seven-year term as ambassador to Britain on 21 July 2026 and has not yet replaced him, leaving its London mission headed by a chargé d’affaires. The Russian embassy has described bilateral relations as having deteriorated to an unprecedentedly low level.
More recently, on 18 September, Russia summoned Britain’s deputy head of mission in Moscow and protested against British supplies of drones and other weapons to Ukraine. Moscow warned that British facilities supporting Ukrainian long-range operations could become targets for retaliatory action.
Britain, meanwhile, has also summoned Russian representatives, including Russia’s chargé d’affaires on 3 September following the drone attack on Leipzig airport.
Diplomatic relations have therefore not been severed. But they have deteriorated considerably.
This is where Germany offers another warning.
If mainstream governments allow the very idea of negotiation with Russia to become associated exclusively with populist parties, those parties acquire a powerful political argument.
Diplomacy is not friendship.
Talking to an adversary does not mean agreeing with that adversary. Supporting Ukrainian sovereignty does not logically prevent governments from maintaining channels through which a settlement might eventually be discussed.
Wars ultimately end either through military outcome, political settlement, or some combination of the two. A government supporting Ukraine should therefore still be capable of explaining what it believes an eventual diplomatic route might look like.
Otherwise, parties such as Reform UK may find an opening similar to that used by the AfD: presenting themselves as the people asking about negotiation while portraying mainstream parties as committed to an indefinite conflict.
There is then the question of money.
Britain is significantly increasing defence expenditure. The Government’s 2026 Defence Investment Plan puts Ministry of Defence spending at almost £298 billion over four years, with annual expenditure rising from £68.3 billion in 2026-27 to £79.1 billion in 2029-30.
There are legitimate national-security arguments for this expenditure. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and wider international instability cannot simply be wished away.
But there is also a legitimate democratic question about opportunity cost.
Every government operates with finite resources. Citizens seeing deteriorating roads, pressure on the NHS, expensive housing, struggling local authorities and inadequate infrastructure will naturally ask how national priorities are being determined.
This does not prove that defence spending causes inadequate public services. Government finances are considerably more complicated than that.
But politically, perception matters.
A government that explains why another billion pounds is necessary for national security must be equally capable of explaining what it is doing for the person waiting for an operation, the business facing high energy costs or the family unable to afford a home.
Otherwise, foreign expenditure and domestic hardship become very easy for opposition parties to connect, whether or not the causal relationship is as simple as they suggest.
Economic inequality requires similar care.
It is tempting to say that inequality is simply rising continuously in Germany and Britain, but the statistics do not support such a sweeping claim.
Germany’s official Gini measure of income inequality increased from 29.5 in 2024 to 30.1 in 2025, but remains close to levels recorded earlier in the decade. In Britain, the latest comparable ONS figures available for disposable household income showed a Gini coefficient of 32.9 per cent in 2023-24, slightly below the previous year.
The more defensible political point is therefore not that inequality is relentlessly increasing.
It is that substantial inequality remains, while many households experience economic insecurity even when headline economic indicators improve.
In Britain in 2023-24, the richest fifth received 35 per cent of total disposable household income while the poorest fifth received 8 per cent.
That matters politically because people do not experience GDP.
They experience wages, rent, mortgages, food, energy, taxation and whether their children appear likely to live better or worse lives than they did.
When economic growth exists statistically but citizens cannot recognise it in their own lives, the credibility of the political centre becomes vulnerable.
And this brings me to perhaps the most uncomfortable subject for British politics: Brexit.
Whatever one’s position in the 2016 referendum, Brexit should no longer be treated as a question of political identity. Ten years later, it should be examined as an economic policy whose results can be measured.
The Office for Budget Responsibility continues to assume that the post-Brexit trading relationship will leave UK long-run productivity approximately 4 per cent lower than if Britain had remained in the European Union. It also estimates that UK exports and imports will each eventually be around 15 per cent lower than under continued membership.
These are estimates, not mathematical certainties, and other economists can challenge the assumptions behind them. But they are the assumptions currently used by Britain’s independent fiscal watchdog.
This does not automatically mean Britain should rejoin the European Union. Nor does it automatically settle the question of Single Market membership, which would involve economic benefits, regulatory obligations and difficult political choices.
But surely it justifies reopening the economic conversation.
If closer participation in the European Single Market could materially improve trade, investment, productivity and business confidence, it should be examined on its economic merits rather than rejected because politicians fear reopening the argument of 2016.
For a country searching for growth, deliberately refusing even to examine one of the world’s largest markets sitting immediately beside it would itself be a political choice.
Germany’s elections therefore offer Britain something more valuable than a prediction.
They offer a warning about fragmentation.
Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern demonstrate the strength that a populist right can acquire when immigration, economic insecurity, energy and dissatisfaction with established institutions become connected in the public mind.
Berlin demonstrates something equally important. Dissatisfaction does not necessarily travel in only one direction.
That is the lesson I believe Andy Burnham should study.
Do not dismiss concerns because the right speaks about them.
But do not assume that adopting the right’s language will neutralise the right.
Control immigration, but make integration work.
Protect refugees’ legal and human rights, but maintain confidence in the asylum system.
Punish crime according to law without turning nationality into a presumption of criminality.
Build clean energy, but explain how the transition protects jobs, industry and household finances.
Support national security, but keep diplomacy alive.
Spend what is genuinely necessary on defence, but never allow communities to believe that their own infrastructure has become secondary.
And reconsider Britain’s economic relationship with Europe according to the evidence of 2026 rather than the political arguments of 2016.
Perhaps the deepest lesson from Germany is that the political centre cannot survive merely by positioning itself halfway between left and right.
It has to understand why people are leaving the centre in the first place.
If those causes are ignored, the right and left will each provide their own explanation.
And eventually, voters will choose one of them.
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