AfD secures historic east German victory with 44%, falls short of majority

The Alternative for Germany, a far-right party that has operated at the margins of mainstream politics for over a decade, has won control of a German state for the first time since the Nazi era. Preliminary results from Saxony-Anhalt show the AfD captured 43.8 percent of the vote in elections held on September 6, 2026—more than double what the party achieved in the same state five years earlier. The victory is historic not because the AfD secured an outright majority, which it did not, but because no far-right party has governed a German state since 1945.

The AfD fell short of the 42 seats needed for an absolute majority in the 83-seat state parliament, securing 39 seats instead. Yet the party's state leader, Ulrich Siegmund, a 35-year-old who has become the public face of the AfD in the east, declared the result a mandate to govern. "This isn't just about Saxony-Anhalt," he told supporters gathered at the party's election night headquarters. "It's a signal for the whole of Germany—a self-confident signal." The crowd erupted in cheers as projections appeared on screens, and moments later broke into singing the national anthem. Siegmund's confidence rested on the possibility of a coalition with the BSW, a left-wing populist party that scraped into parliament with five seats. Though the BSW has maintained distance from the AfD nationally, it shares the AfD's skepticism of migration and its openness to Russian gas imports, creating a potential path to power.

The scale of the shift in Saxony-Anhalt cannot be overstated. The conservative CDU, long the dominant force in eastern German politics, saw its vote share collapse by more than half, landing at 17.2 percent. The SPD, which governs nationally in coalition with the CDU, described the outcome as "truly dramatic." Turnout reached 77.8 percent, suggesting voters across the political spectrum felt the weight of the choice before them. One AfD supporter interviewed by the BBC, a man named Ollie, explained his vote simply: "This man gives us what no-one else can give." Another voter, Bert, spoke of fear—fear that safety was eroding, that things needed to improve for his family of five. These were not fringe voices; they represented a substantial portion of the electorate in a state of 2.1 million people.

The result reverberated far beyond Saxony-Anhalt. Germany's main television channel, Das Erste, cancelled its long-running crime drama Tatort to provide continuous coverage of what the election meant. US President Donald Trump posted a screenshot of the German TV projection to his Truth Social platform. A Russian presidential envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, then screenshotted Trump's post and praised the AfD as a "historic win for the pragmatic" party, calling it "the party of hope and reason." Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk saw the result through a different lens entirely, saying that "in Poland only idiots and traitors can rejoice at the triumph of the AfD." The international attention underscored how the AfD's rise had become a matter of concern and calculation for governments across Europe and beyond.

The AfD's platform includes policies that have alarmed mainstream German politics and civil society. The party advocates for "remigration," a term widely understood to mean mass deportations of migrants, though the AfD claims it refers only to deporting criminals and those in the country illegally. The party has also drawn criticism for its rhetoric about cultural institutions. It has called the Bauhaus school of design, located in Dessau in Saxony-Anhalt, "the dead-end of modernism"—language that some observers have compared to Nazi-era denunciations of modernist culture. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, one of the AfD's senior figures in the state, has faced scrutiny for his approach to Russia; when asked about a Russian army mug displayed in his office, he dismissed it as a souvenir and said of the war in Ukraine, "it's not our war."

The AfD is classified by German domestic intelligence as "right-wing extremist," a designation Siegmund rejects. Yet the classification reflects genuine concerns among those who have studied the party's ideology and rhetoric. Charlotte Knobloch, the 93-year-old head of the Jewish community in Munich and Bavaria and a Holocaust survivor, said the result frightened her. "On days like this I find it hard to recognise my homeland any more," she said, appealing to mainstream parties not to stand passively by. At an anti-AfD "Democracy Festival" held in Magdeburg on the eve of the vote, a demonstrator named Nikita urged Germans to "learn from our history and not go back. We don't want the dark times any more."

The question now facing Saxony-Anhalt and Germany more broadly is whether the AfD will actually govern. Siegmund has refused to lead a minority government, suggesting instead that if coalition talks fail, new elections would simply deliver the AfD an even larger share—perhaps 50 or 55 percent, he claimed. Whether that prediction holds depends on the BSW and whether other parties can be persuaded to work with the AfD on individual issues. Mainstream parties have maintained what Germans call a Brandmauer, or firewall, refusing coalition with the far right. But firewalls, once breached, are difficult to rebuild. The AfD leads national opinion polls ahead of federal elections, and its heartland remains the eastern states, where economic anxiety and demographic decline have created fertile ground for anti-establishment politics. The result in Saxony-Anhalt is not an endpoint but a waypoint—a signal of momentum that will shape German politics for years to come.