After the AfD landslide in Saxony-Anhalt: Why IG Metall Berlin is voting against conscription

On September 8th, three days after the AfD election victory in Saxony-Anhalt, the delegates of IG Metall Berlin sat together and voted with a large majority in favor of a motion by the IG Metall youth against conscription and militarization. The agenda actually included collective bargaining rounds and state elections, but the connection that the delegates themselves drew is not a coincidence: rearmament, social cuts and the normalization of the extreme right are not a coincidence, they are the same policy with three faces.

This is remarkable because it comes from below, from a union that traditionally rarely takes an open position against the federal government's rearmament line. The youth organization pushed through the motion and the assembly approved it with a large majority, in the middle of a time when the Union and the SPD are discussing a de facto reintroduction of compulsory military service and the defense budget is growing every year, while the employers' collective bargaining representatives are simultaneously attacking the 35-hour week. Who pays for the upgrade? Not the shareholders of the defense companies. The answer from the IG Metall youth group: not us, not like that.

The temporal connection with the election in Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD became the strongest force on September 6th, was named by the delegates themselves, not interpreted by us. According to the IG Metall report, they discussed the shift to the right intensively and then jointly called for participation in the Berlin House of Representatives election on September 20th. That's the right response, but it falls short if it ends at the ballot box. The AfD is not growing despite the rearmament and austerity policies of the so-called democratic center, it is growing with it because both serve the same worldview: security through hardship, forcing employees to make austerity, spending on the Bundeswehr.

Trade union grassroots anti-fascism often looks exactly like this: not a statement from headquarters, but a request from below, enforced against the usual reflexes of one's own organization. On September 22nd, IG Metall Berlin will begin finding nationwide demands for the metal and electrical industry collective bargaining round. From October 31st, the peace obligations will end and warning strikes will be possible. This collective bargaining round will also be an answer to the question of whether class politics and anti-militarism can be brought together before the extreme right claims both.

What interests us in this report is not the detail of a union meeting, but the pattern: youth organizations in the DGB unions draw the line between rearmament, social cuts and a shift to the right more consistently than their executive boards. This is the movement that needs to be strengthened, not one that is reported once and then forgotten.

Sources

IG Metall Berlin: Delegates Meeting September 8th, 2026