The Alternative for Germany took 43.8 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, 6 September, according to preliminary official results. The party doubled its support. It still came up short of what it needs to govern alone.
Projections gave the AfD 39 of the 83 seats in the state parliament in Magdeburg, three fewer than the 42 required for a majority. The centre-right Christian Democrats of Chancellor Friedrich Merz finished a distant second at 17.2 percent, having lost more than half of their previous vote share. The Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left each got about 9 percent. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance barely cleared the 5 percent threshold, and the Free Democrats lost their seats.
Turnout reached 77.8 percent, up from 60 percent in 2021. The AfD won 38 of the 41 constituency races. The Left took the other three.
“We have achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve,” said lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund. “We have made history in this state.” Co-leader Alice Weidel called the result “historic”. Tino Chrupalla, the other co-leader, told broadcaster ARD that voters had delivered “a clear verdict” and had “definitively rejected” the firewall, the policy under which every other mainstream party refuses to work with the AfD.
A government without the AfD
No state government or federal cabinet in Germany has ever included the party. Saxony-Anhalt’s branch has been classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation by the state’s domestic intelligence agency. The AfD rejects that label as politically motivated.
Premier Sven Schulze, a Christian Democrat, congratulated the AfD and said, “We’re going to have to live with this result.” He later said he did not intend to cooperate with the party, though he first declined to give a clear answer when asked whether the firewall would hold. Merz made no statement on election night. He left the party’s Berlin headquarters after 10pm local time.
The arithmetic is awkward. Schulze could try to assemble an alliance of several parties, but his party has traditionally ruled out formal cooperation with both the AfD and the Left.
The campaign and its critics
Siegmund, who has ridden an East German-made Simson Schwalbe moped to campaign stops, including the polling station in his hometown of Tangermunde, has been called the friendly face of the AfD. His promises were harder-edged. They included a “remigration and deportation offensive” aimed at undocumented migrants from day one. The party also wants rainbow flags at public schools replaced with the German flag and less emphasis on the Third Reich in history lessons. It plans to lure back German expatriates to fill labour gaps and to pay baby bonuses in a state of 2.1 million people.
The German Economic Institute has warned that the immigration policy would be “ruinous” for a state that depends heavily on foreign-born workers, especially in health care. Thuringia’s Interior Minister Georg Maier told Handelsblatt that the Kremlin “makes no secret of the fact that the AfD is the most important instrument for destabilising Germany for Putin.”
Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane, reporting from Magdeburg, put the open question plainly: whether the vote was enough to give the AfD control of the state. “Right now, we cannot say for sure,” he said.
Sources
- 2026 Saxony-Anhalt state election – Wikipedia
- German far-right AfD wins Saxony-Anhalt election, falls short of majority
- 2026 Saxony-Anhalt state election
