Ulrich Siegmund rode to the polling station in his hometown of Tangermunde on an East German Simson Schwalbe moped, his wife on the back. By Sunday night, September 6, his Alternative for Germany had won Saxony-Anhalt with 43.8 percent in preliminary official results. “We have achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve,” Siegmund said. “We have made history in this state.”
It was a big win and still not enough. The AfD doubled its vote, but Al Jazeera’s projections gave it 39 of the 83 seats in the Magdeburg parliament, three short of the 42 needed for an outright majority.
The numbers
The governing Christian Democrats (CDU), the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, lost more than half of their previous vote and finished on 17.2 percent. The Social Democrats, the Greens and The Left each took about 9 percent. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance cleared the 5 percent threshold only barely. The Free Democrats lost their seats.
Turnout reached 77.8 percent, a record for the state and well above the 60 percent of 2021. The AfD won 38 of the 41 constituency contests, and The Left took the other three.
The firewall
The AfD has never been in a governing coalition in any of Germany’s 16 states or in the federal government, because every other mainstream party refuses to work with it. Co-leader Tino Chrupalla told broadcaster ARD that voters had spoken. The mainstream parties “were voted out,” he said, and the firewall had been “definitively rejected by the voters today.” Co-leader Alice Weidel called the result historic and said it gave the party a clear mandate to govern.
Siegmund said he would extend a hand to every party willing to bring about a fundamental political transformation, though he added that the AfD would not bend to anyone else’s will.
Premier Sven Schulze of the CDU congratulated the AfD and said his party would “have to live with this result.” He later said he did not intend to cooperate with the AfD, though at first he declined to say whether the CDU’s firewall would stay. The arithmetic is hard for him too. He could try to assemble an alliance of several parties, but the CDU has traditionally ruled out formal cooperation with both the AfD and The Left. Merz made no statement on Sunday evening; he left the CDU’s headquarters, the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus, shortly after 10 pm local time.
Platform and criticism
Siegmund has been called the friendly face of the party, but his promises are radical. They include a “remigration and deportation offensive” from the first day, aimed at undocumented migrants. The party also wants to replace rainbow flags at public schools with the German flag, and to change history teaching to put less weight on the Third Reich. To fill gaps left by migrant workers, it would try to draw expatriate Germans home and pay “baby bonuses” in a state of 2.1 million people that is shrinking.
The German Economic Institute has warned that the immigration policy would be “ruinous” for Saxony-Anhalt, which depends heavily on foreign-born workers, especially in health care. The state’s domestic intelligence agency classifies the state branch as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization. The party rejects that label as politically motivated.
Others fear that an AfD-run state security apparatus could leak sensitive information to Russia. Thuringia’s interior minister, Georg Maier, told the Handelsblatt newspaper that the Kremlin “makes no secret of the fact that the AfD is the most important instrument for destabilising Germany for Putin.”
Sources
- 2026 Saxony-Anhalt state election – Wikipedia
- German far-right AfD wins Saxony-Anhalt election, falls short of majority
