I rarely write about politics. Deliberately.
But last Sunday’s election in Saxony-Anhalt has stayed with me: 43.8% for the AfD, more than twice its 2021 result, with record turnout.
You can have strong views about the AfD. I do. But this is no longer adequately explained as protest. Many voters increasingly believe this party can solve problems.
A firewall may be politically justified. But it is not a strategy for more than 40% of an electorate. You can exclude a party from power. You cannot exclude its voters from society.
This isn’t abstract for me.
People in my wider family and circle sympathize with the AfD. I find some of those conversations very difficult.
But what is the alternative? Insult them? Break off contact? Stop being curious why people I know have arrived at conclusions I strongly disagree with?
That brings me to this platform.
LinkedIn is largely a bubble of people like me: educated, international, mobile, economically secure. We talk a lot about diversity, openness and inclusion.
How far does that inclusion really extend?
A culture that prides itself on inclusion can be remarkably exclusive toward people whose values it considers outdated.
Attachment to nation and place. Traditional ideas of family. The desire for boundaries, order and cultural familiarity.
You don’t need to share those values. I don’t share many of them. But dismissing them as backward reproduces the exclusion we otherwise oppose.
Modern societies have created cultural as well as economic winners and losers. People can lose recognition, status and the sense that their way of life still has a place.
Meanwhile, transformations are hitting at once: globalization, migration, changing cultural norms, technology, climate adaptation, geopolitical insecurity, AI.
Change can feel less like something you shape and more like something happening to you.
The question is how societies absorb it without leaving people economically or culturally behind.
This is where Vertical Development gives me a different perspective.
Greater maturity means holding more complexity without discarding fundamental human needs.
Freedom doesn’t replace belonging. Openness doesn’t replace boundaries. Diversity doesn’t replace shared identity. Change doesn’t replace continuity.
When a supposedly more developed worldview dismisses what came before as backward, it hasn’t integrated it. It has rejected it.
Under pressure, our capacity for complexity shrinks. Collectively, that can become powerful.
The populist right offers simple answers. But reducing its voters to angry, backward or uneducated people is another form of simplification.
The answer isn’t to adopt the AfD’s positions. It is to take seriously the needs on which its success is built.
That challenge starts with us. Especially in bubbles like this one.
A firewall can define what democracy will not accept.
It cannot answer what democracy must offer.