AfD surges to victory in German state election but falls short of majority

In the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, voters delivered a stunning rebuke to Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his Christian Democrats on Sunday, handing a commanding victory to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland while stopping just short of handing the party an outright majority. The AfD captured 43.8 percent of the vote—nearly double its showing five years earlier—and won 39 seats in the 83-member state parliament. Three seats shy of the 42 needed to govern alone, the party now faces the complicated work of assembling a coalition from a field of opponents who have sworn not to work with it.

Merz's CDU, which has governed Saxony-Anhalt since 2002, collapsed to 17.2 percent, hemorrhaging roughly half its support and winning only 15 seats. The result amounts to a public verdict on a chancellor who promised to reset Germany's struggling economy and contain the rise of the far right, and has delivered on neither. In Saxony-Anhalt alone, only 9 percent of voters expressed satisfaction with his leadership. The Social Democrats took 9.3 percent and eight seats, the Greens 8.9 percent and eight seats, the Left party 8.6 percent and eight seats, and the smaller BSW party 5.3 percent and five seats. Turnout reached a record 76.5 percent among the state's 1.7 million eligible voters.

Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD's 35-year-old candidate for governor, declared victory with the words "we have written history," telling the public broadcaster ARD that voters had sent a signal that "things cannot carry on like this." He credited Merz himself as an effective campaigner for the AfD, a barb aimed at the chancellor's unpopularity. Siegmund has promised an immediate offensive on deportations and remigration, a ban on rainbow flags in schools, a halt to new wind farm construction, and a rebranding of the state's motto from "Think Modern" to "Think German." He also wants to restore the singing of the national anthem in schools. The AfD's platform has capitalized on nostalgia for communist East Germany and tapped into discontent among eastern Germans, with Siegmund making repeated claims about rising foreigner-related crime even as the state's overall crime rate has fallen sharply.

The AfD has been classified as "rightwing extremist" by Germany's domestic intelligence agency, and the party's pro-Kremlin stance—it opposes continued support for Ukraine and seeks to strip Ukrainian refugees of their status—has raised alarms among security analysts. The German Economic Institute has warned that the party's immigration policies would prove "calamitous" for a state with an aging, shrinking population that depends heavily on foreign workers. Some critics have expressed concern that an AfD-led government could compromise sensitive information to Russia, though the party has dismissed such claims and called for reform of the domestic intelligence service, which it says is biased.

Siegmund has said the AfD will not engage in "games" such as forming a minority government, yet the arithmetic of the chamber makes stable coalition-building extraordinarily difficult. The CDU has reaffirmed its refusal to work with the AfD, and the AfD has ruled out working with the CDU. The smaller parties face their own constraints: the BSW has said it will not support either Siegmund or the incumbent governor, Sven Schulze, though it has criticized the mainstream "firewall" against the AfD. Franziska Hoppermann, the CDU's general secretary, called the result a "defeat overall" for her party and "a defeat for all those who have borne responsibility in the democracy in Saxony-Anhalt over the past 35 years," a reference to the difficult post-communist transition.

The election unfolded against a backdrop of high tension. Thousands of AfD opponents gathered in the state capital, Magdeburg, on Saturday for what organizers called a "festival of democracy." A message projected onto Magdeburg Cathedral read: "We do not abandon what we love. True love of the homeland is not the AfD." The bishop of Magdeburg, Gerhard Feige, warned churchgoers against forces "that want to sow discord, stoke mistrust and fear," drawing parallels to history and cautioning that "not everyone who votes or is elected democratically is a democrat." Police maintained a considerable presence throughout the state.

The Saxony-Anhalt election was widely viewed as the most significant test yet for Merz, whose government has failed to reverse Germany's economic struggles or arrest the AfD's steady rise since the party entered the federal parliament in 2017. The AfD is now the Bundestag's leading opposition party and has overtaken the CDU in national polling. The party has its sights set on federal elections in 2029 or 2033. How Saxony-Anhalt's coalition negotiations unfold—and whether the AfD can find a path to power despite the firewall—will shape not only the state's immediate future but also the broader question of whether mainstream German democracy can contain a far-right force that has become its largest opposition.