AfD's Saxony-Anhalt Victory Shakes Germany as Coalition Talks Loom

On Sunday, September 6, Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany party won a state election in Saxony-Anhalt with a result that shook the country's political establishment. The AfD captured 39 seats—more than any other party—but fell just short of the 45 seats needed to govern alone. The victory was historic in scale and unsettling in its implications. Within hours, the party's leaders were calling on other politicians to abandon the so-called firewall, the informal agreement among mainstream parties to refuse cooperation with the far right. By Monday, the reverberations had spread across Europe and into the highest levels of German government.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose Christian Democratic Union finished a distant second with 17.2 percent of the vote—a collapse of nearly 20 percentage points from 2021—said the result had shaken his party "to its very foundations." He ruled out any cooperation with the AfD while acknowledging that Germany's party system was undergoing what he called a "tectonic shift." The CDU's state chairman, Sven Schulze, resigned immediately after the loss. A Bundestag lawmaker named Sepp Müller announced his candidacy to replace Schulze, but faced fierce criticism from Merz and other federal CDU leaders for comments he had made days before the election suggesting that the AfD's lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, had a mandate to attempt forming a government. Merz said he could not understand why a deputy leader of the CDU's parliamentary group would "stab the party's own top candidate in the back" during the closing days of the campaign.

The AfD's path to power remained uncertain. The party needed three additional votes to reach a majority. The left-wing populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, which won seats in the election, was open to negotiating with the AfD on some issues, though no formal coalition agreement had been reached. Siegmund, the AfD's top candidate, said he would seek to become state premier but acknowledged he would need a stable majority to govern effectively. At a press conference on Monday, AfD co-leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla called the result "historic" and urged other parties to reconsider the firewall. Weidel claimed the party was not anti-immigrant but rather opposed to "unqualified immigrants receiving German taxpayer funds," while simultaneously promising mass deportations once in power. Neither she nor Siegmund provided data to support their claims about immigrant crime, despite crime statistics showing immigrants make up only a small minority of criminal suspects in Germany.

The election result reverberated far beyond Saxony-Anhalt. A poll published by German public broadcaster ARD on Monday evening found that 64 percent of German voters viewed the outcome with concern, while 24 percent said they were pleased. Fifty-one percent of respondents believed other parties should involve the AfD more closely in political work, while 45 percent opposed such involvement. In Berlin, more than 2,500 people gathered for a demonstration organized by activist groups Campact and Fridays for Future, with politicians from the Greens and Left Party in attendance. Protesters carried signs criticizing the AfD and chanting slogans like "everyone united against fascism." A smaller demonstration also took place in Potsdam.

European leaders expressed alarm. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, speaking in Lithuania on Monday, framed the AfD's rise in the context of Russian hybrid threats and sabotage, warning that parties gaining influence while ignoring these dangers posed a risk to European security. She referenced the alleged attempted drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport and said Europe might one day realize it had not done enough to protect itself. French Finance Minister Roland Lescure called the AfD victory "a very, very worrying signal" and part of a "populist wave spreading around the world." Italy's La Repubblica described an "unsettling new page in German history," noting that Saxony-Anhalt voters had betrayed the postwar vow of "never again" by choosing a far-right party. Spain's El País argued that Europe's democrats needed to rethink their failed strategies of either imitating extremists or attempting to isolate them.

Eva Umlauf, a Holocaust survivor and president of the International Auschwitz Committee, told Germany's Catholic News Agency that the election result "scares" her. She asked what path Germany was on and whether it was the one the country had traveled before. Umlauf said Holocaust survivors had never thought it possible that a right-wing extremist party would again be voted into power at the state level, though the AfD had already become the largest faction in Thuringia's state parliament in 2024. She vowed to continue fighting for democracy and for the memory of the six million Jews killed during the Nazi era, saying survivors "owe it to our murdered relatives" to keep that memory alive.

The AfD's rise has been nearly constant since its founding as an anti-euro party in April 2013. The party capitalized on concerns about immigration under then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, experienced a slight dip in 2019 amid infighting and backlash against right-wing violence, then resurged by latching onto opposition to pandemic restrictions. Now, with elections scheduled in Berlin on September 20, the party was hoping to secure its best-ever vote share in the German capital, where it was positioned as one of five parties competing to emerge as the largest single faction. The Saxony-Anhalt result suggested momentum was on the far right's side, and the question of whether mainstream parties could hold the line against the AfD—or whether that line was already breaking—would define German politics in the months ahead.