Germany must start buying cheap oil and gas from Russia again and join peace talks with Moscow as soon as possible - that is the message from Alice Weidel, co-leader of the Alternative for Germany, just days after her party won a commanding victory in the Saxony-Anhalt election.

The numbers from that election are what make the statement hard to ignore. The AfD took 43.8 percent of the vote. Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Christian Democratic Union fell to 17.2 percent. The party won 39 of 83 seats in the regional parliament, finishing a few mandates short of an outright majority.

"Where they are cheapest"

"We have to buy fossil fuels where our Asian colleagues are doing it so successfully - where natural gas and oil are cheapest. And that is Russia," Weidel said.

The position is not new. Weidel has openly called before for resuming imports of cheap Russian gas, arguing that access to affordable Russian energy was for decades one of the foundations of the "made in Germany" industrial model. Last week in the Bundestag she again accused the government of endangering energy security by abandoning Russian gas, and warned of possible supply problems over the winter.

Merz sharply rejected her performance. He said Berlin will continue to support Ukraine and accused the AfD of pursuing a policy towards Moscow that is not in Germany's interest.

An argument that works even when the source is unpalatable

This is the moment where it is easy to go wrong. The most convenient way to dismiss an uncomfortable argument is to point at who is making it - and Weidel is, for Germany, exactly as contentious as she sounds. But it does not follow from that that the electricity bill in Leipzig comes out any different.

That is why the party is growing. Not because Germans have suddenly warmed to Moscow, but because four years after the decision to break with Russian gas, someone on the ballot paper is offering a version in which the bill is smaller again. Whether that version is realistic is the second question. The first is who put it on the table at all, and why everyone else left that ground vacant.

The nuclear plants and Mao

Weidel attacked the decision to shut down Germany's nuclear plants most fiercely of all. She recalled that the country once had 19 nuclear plants connected to the grid and judged that closing them was a deliberate destruction of Germany's technological advantage.

"Germany once had the most modern nuclear plants. We were world leaders, and those plants produced electricity with no carbon dioxide emissions. They deliberately switched them off, destroyed them. I call that deliberate technological vandalism. Mao would be proud of this federal government," Weidel said.

The comparison refers to the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. The rhetoric is aimed at effect, but the point underneath it is the one even the AfD's opponents struggle with: the nuclear decision was taken in one energy reality and remained in force in an entirely different one.

What the party is demanding now

The AfD is now trying to convert its electoral triumph in Saxony-Anhalt into pressure for a policy shift at federal level. The demands are clear: halting or drastically reducing German aid to Ukraine, normalising relations with Russia, returning to Russian energy and leaning on nuclear power again.

For four years Europe built its energy policy on the assumption that a return to Russian gas was politically impossible. In Saxony-Anhalt that assumption got 43.8 percent.