The Alternative for Germany won the Saxony-Anhalt state election on September 6 with 43.8 percent of the vote, according to preliminary official results. The centre-right Christian Democrats of Chancellor Friedrich Merz managed 17.2 percent.
Projections gave the AfD 39 of the 83 seats in the state parliament in Magdeburg. An absolute majority needs 42.
“We have achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve,” said Ulrich Siegmund, the party’s lead candidate. “We have made history in this state.” Co-leader Alice Weidel also called the result “historic”. Siegmund said he would extend a hand to any party willing to bring about a fundamental political transformation, but added that the AfD would not bend to the will of others.
Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane, reporting from Magdeburg, put the open question plainly: the AfD had the lion’s share of the votes, but whether that was enough to control the state could not yet be said.
The firewall
The AfD has never sat in a governing coalition in any of Germany’s 16 states, or in the federal government. The other mainstream parties refuse to work with it, a policy known as the “firewall”.
Tino Chrupalla, the party’s national co-leader, told the broadcaster ARD that voters had delivered a clear verdict and that the firewall had been “definitively rejected by the voters today”.
Incumbent premier Sven Schulze, of the CDU, congratulated the AfD. “We’re going to have to live with this result,” he said. 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 stay. The CDU has traditionally ruled out formal cooperation with both the AfD and the Left party, so Schulze would have to assemble an alliance of several parties, and the projected seat count makes that exceptionally difficult.
Merz made no statement on election night. He left the CDU headquarters, the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus, shortly after 10pm local time. The result adds to pressure on a chancellor whose coalition is struggling to restart growth in Europe’s largest economy.
What the party promises
The state’s domestic intelligence agency has classified the Saxony-Anhalt AfD branch as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation. The party rejects the label as politically motivated.
Siegmund has been called the friendly face of the party. On polling day he rode an East German-made Simson Schwalbe bike to the booth in his hometown of Tangermunde, his wife along for the ride. His platform is harder than his image. He has promised a “remigration and deportation offensive” against undocumented migrants from day one, rainbow flags at public schools replaced with the German flag, and history lessons that put less weight on Hitler’s Third Reich. To fill the gap left by migrant workers, the AfD wants to draw German expatriates home and pay “baby bonuses” to families in a state of 2.1 million people.
The German Economic Institute has warned that the immigration policy would be “ruinous” for Saxony-Anhalt, which relies heavily on foreign-born workers, especially in health care. Others fear that an AfD-run security apparatus could pass sensitive information to Russia. 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”.
