Merz clashes with AfD leader after far-right's stunning Saxony-Anhalt victory

Friedrich Merz stood in the Bundestag on Wednesday and told Alice Weidel that her party's migration policy was nothing more than ethnic cleansing dressed in bureaucratic language. The chancellor was responding to a seismic result in Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD had just won nearly 44 percent of the vote—the strongest performance by a far-right party in any German state since the end of World War Two. Merz's own Christian Democrats, by contrast, had been cut in half, falling to 17.2 percent. The clash between the two leaders played out in real time, with AfD MPs heckling so aggressively that Bundestag President Julia Klöckner eventually threatened to expel people from the chamber, saying they were not on a football pitch.

Weidel opened the session by declaring that Merz's coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats had failed, that his time was finished, and that voters had made their judgment clear. She pointed to what she framed as the consequences of the government's immigration stance: daily knife violence, attacks on trains and in stations. Merz's response was direct. He said one in six skilled workers in Germany had a migration background. If the AfD got its way, he told her, the result would be that no single care home, no hospital, no restaurant could function. He also accused the party of betraying voters by promising before the election that its candidate for state premier, Ulrich Siegmund, would only take office if he won an outright majority—then abandoning that pledge within hours of the results.

The AfD's victory in Saxony-Anhalt has not yet translated into a clear path to power. The party fell three seats short of an outright majority in the state legislature, meaning it will need to negotiate with other parties to form a government. The party has signaled openness to working with the left-wing populist BSW, as long as that party backs Siegmund as premier. Remarkably, Siegmund's deputy has even suggested that Merz's CDU could join such a coalition if it abandoned the so-called firewall—the informal agreement among mainstream parties not to work with the far-right. That proposal underscores how thoroughly the Saxony-Anhalt result has scrambled German politics.

Merz has acknowledged that the election outcome was seismic and has changed Germany. The result has also attracted international attention. US President Donald Trump praised the AfD's performance, calling it a "really big night" for the populist movement and linking it directly to what he described as Germany's "absolutely horrible immigration rules and regulations." A phone call between Trump and Merz that had been scheduled for Wednesday to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11 was postponed, though Berlin's government spokesman offered no explanation and set no new date.

The chancellor's language about the AfD's migration policy was unusually sharp. He said the party had harmed German interests by backing Russia and that its "remigration" offensive—the party's stated goal of deporting and removing irregular migrants—would affect millions of people. The AfD itself has been labeled "right-wing extremist" by German domestic intelligence. Merz told Weidel plainly: "You are and will remain a destructive force." Yet the math in Saxony-Anhalt remains uncertain. No far-right party has held power in any of Germany's 16 states since 1945, and whether the AfD will actually be able to form a government there depends on which other parties are willing to break with the firewall. That question now hangs over German politics.