This Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt – a federal state of just over two million in eastern Germany – is of enormous significance. For the first time, the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) could win an election so decisively that no alternative coalition could be formed to exclude it. Recent polls have consistently given the AfD more than 40 per cent of the vote – almost double that of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which is currently the biggest party in Saxony-Anhalt’s governing coalition. If these polls are accurate, not even a ‘firewall’ of anti-AfD parties governing together can keep it from winning political power.

The party-political establishment has been presenting its fight against the AfD as a fight for democracy. But for those who understand democracy in its true sense – that power rests with the people – the threat is coming from the other direction.

Germany’s political and media elites have consistently demonised the AfD. It is described, relentlessly, as ‘right-wing extremist’, to use the words of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The anti-AfD hysteria has gone so far that the party’s candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, was described on the cover of Der Spiegel in August as Germany’s ‘most dangerous man’.

This framing has done little to reduce the AfD’s support. If anything, it has had the opposite effect. What seems to have resonated instead is the AfD’s promise of overturning the status quo. And it is precisely this promise that appears to unsettle the establishment most deeply.

But this fear of change reveals more about the elites than it does about the AfD. For them, preserving the existing order takes precedence over respecting the democratic will of the people. And, lacking both principles and the ability to inspire voters, the elites have been dressing up their desperate defence of the status quo as a fight for democracy.

The elites’ fear of change has exposed something genuinely authoritarian in those who would stop the populists at any cost. For the first time in postwar German history, a state parliament – Saxony-Anhalt’s – has passed legislation designed specifically to constrain the next administration.

The ‘emergency rules’, supported by all parties except the AfD, were passed in April. The key changes include giving minor parties the power to elect the state’s minister-president, a privilege traditionally guaranteed to the largest party. The new rules also increase the threshold for the appointment of judges to a two-thirds majority – a share of the vote no party could hope to attain. When the inevitable stalemate ensues – a situation the new law is clearly intended to produce – the Saxony-Anhalt Constitutional Court will be able to nominate its own judges. It is a transparent attempt to defy democracy and the will of the people.

The establishment’s contempt for voters is further illustrated by more extreme proposals still under discussion. These include excluding Saxony-Anhalt from Germany’s fiscal equalisation scheme, which redistributes revenue from richer to poorer states (a category in which Saxony-Anhalt, in traditionally poor East Germany, belongs). This proposal has been floated by journalists from Die Zeit and members of the Green Party – pointing to the EU’s treatment of Hungary under Viktor Orbán as an example. Other proposals are simply petty, such as excluding Saxony-Anhalt from regular conferences between state ministers.

Last week, Germany’s federal defence minister, Boris Pistorius, went furthest of all. He called for the AfD to be banned in four eastern states, including Saxony-Anhalt. Comparing the AfD’s rise with that of the Nazis, Pistorius said it was foolish to think it could be defeated through democratic debate alone.

Most voters see through the attempts to cast the AfD as the second coming of the Nazis. They understand that this election is not about whether fascism is returning to Germany. No one in the AfD is calling for the abolition of courts, trade unions, political parties or independent newspapers, as the Nazis did 90 years ago. They understand it is about something very different – namely, how far the political establishment is prepared to undermine democracy to defend itself.

Every pro-establishment voice fixates on something it finds uniquely intolerable about the AfD. It could be the AfD’s opposition to gender ideology and its call for a ban on hormone therapy for minors. Or its pledge to only fund cultural institutions demonstrating a ‘credible commitment to the democratic order and a patriotic attitude’. Or its proposal to house asylum seekers in centralised facilities outside city centres.

There is, of course, plenty to criticise about the AfD. The covert, and sometimes barely concealed, sympathy some of its politicians have for Vladimir Putin is one example. At times, the AfD has flirted not merely with restrictive migration policies, but also with ‘remigration’. The party has never properly defined what this might actually mean – in some people’s telling, it would involve deporting residents who have a legal right to live in Germany. Worst of all, there is the tendency among some of its members to minimise Nazi crimes.

Other policies are simply eccentric. The party’s repeated attacks on Bauhaus architecture strike many as an odd priority for a nation in crisis.

Nevertheless, it is the establishment’s drive to keep the populists from power at any cost – and in doing so, signal to voters that their voice does not count – that poses a greater danger to democracy than the AfD itself.

If Germany’s elites have forgotten that elections, not institutions, are the ultimate source of legitimacy in a democracy, they should not be surprised if voters remind them of it – perhaps with a force that no firewall can contain.