MAGDEBURG, September 7 — The Alternative for Germany has won a state election outright for the first time in its history, capturing 43.8% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday in a result that upends the political order of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union and leaves the far-right party three seats short of an absolute majority.
The figure is more than double the AfD’s showing in the 2021 state election here, and it marks the best result the party has achieved in any contest since its founding 13 years ago. For all the noise around populist gains elsewhere in Europe, the salient point is numerical: the AfD’s leading candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, now commands 39 of the 83 seats in the new state parliament, against the 42 required to form an administration without partners.
The collapse of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union was equally dramatic. The CDU, which has led every Saxony-Anhalt state government since 2002, plummeted to 17.2% from 37.1% in the last state election. It now trails the AfD by more than 26 percentage points.
Notably, this is the party of the sitting chancellor — a center-right formation that once treated eastern Germany as reliable territory.
The Firewall Under Strain
In Germany, winning an election does not automatically confer the machinery of government. The AfD’s 43.8% leaves it isolated by design: other parties have flatly rejected joining a coalition, a line of demarcation known in Germany as the “firewall.” The CDU has maintained this position. So, formally, has the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, the left-wing populist grouping that received 5.3% of the vote and five seats in the legislature.
Yet the BSW’s stance could prove pivotal. The party has ruled out a formal coalition with the AfD, but its positioning could be pivotal in whether the firewall holds in Saxony-Anhalt.
Whether the firewall holds now depends partly on a party that did not exist at the national level two years ago.
What Changed
The result underscores a fundamental shift in Germany’s political system. The AfD is no longer a fringe, anti-European Union protest party confined to spoiler status. It has become, in this state at least, the principal electoral force — and one that other parties must negotiate around even as they refuse to negotiate with it.
The alarm for centrist politics is audible. The AfD’s rise challenges the traditional political establishment across the usual left-right spectrum, not merely on questions of migration or eurozone policy but on the basic arithmetic of governance.
A party that cannot be included in coalitions yet cannot be ignored electorally forces the system into contortions.
What Follows
The immediate question is whether Siegmund can engineer a minority administration, whether new elections become unavoidable, or whether some combination of CDU, BSW, and smaller parties can construct an alternative majority against the largest bloc in parliament. None of these options is straightforward. All of them test the durability of the firewall — and, by extension, the capacity of Germany’s post-war political architecture to accommodate pressures it was not designed to channel.
