SRF satire casts AfD victory as political catastrophe
Saturday 12th September 2026 on 12:45 in
Switzerland
In a satirical column published by SRF, cabaret performer Simon Chen portrays the Alternative for Germany’s landslide in Saxony-Anhalt as a disaster zone caused not by climate change, but by a shift in political attitudes.
Chen compares the result in Magdeburg last Sunday with a flood, hailstorm and wildfires. The AfD, he writes, swept away the other parties, burying them beneath a brown tide. More than half of the Christian Democratic Union’s seats were washed away, while rescue workers searched for surviving parties.
Many voters, Chen says, were not filling out a ballot so much as issuing a warning. Their message was that anything was better than the current situation. Almost half of the AfD’s votes allegedly came from people who had previously stayed away from elections: better the AfD than nothing.
He points to the contradiction of an openly nationalist, ethnic-nationalist, anti-Islam, anti-feminist and racist party winning mass support. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is classified not merely in parts but entirely as confirmed right-wing extremist, the column says.
Voters who had previously backed the CDU, the Left, the Social Democrats or the Greens also moved to the AfD. Chen jokes that this is the only kind of migration the party welcomes. The victorious party is now portrayed as unusually friendly because it needs a small, compliant junior partner to form a majority government.
To prevent an AfD-led government, all other parties would have to join forces in a coalition of the CDU, SPD, Greens, the Left and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. Chen imagines this narrow majority as a rainbow coalition, a name that would itself be a red rag to the AfD. He questions whether democracy is malfunctioning when an anti-democratic party wins a majority through democratic means.
The column ends with another satirical image: rescue workers supposedly recover 20 buried Free Democratic Party candidates alive from the brown mud nearly a week after the catastrophe. The exhausted liberals, however, can no longer be offered a single seat.