Written By | International News Agencies
Saxony-Anhalt hands Germany's far right its first outright state-election victory since 1949, three seats short of the majority it needed
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Background
For a decade, German politics has organised itself around a single unwritten rule: no mainstream party cooperates with the Alternative for Germany. The convention is known as the Brandmauer, the firewall, and it has held at federal level and, with occasional local fraying, at state level too. Its logic was always partly moral and partly arithmetical. So long as the AfD polled in the twenties or low thirties, the other parties could always assemble a majority without it, and the firewall cost them nothing but the discomfort of governing in awkward coalitions. Sunday's election in Saxony-Anhalt, a state of roughly 2.2 million people in the former East Germany, tested whether the arithmetic still works.
The state has been governed since 2021 by a CDU-led coalition with the Social Democrats and the Free Democrats, headed since 2024 by Sven Schulze after the long-serving premier Reiner Haseloff stepped aside. Haseloff had been the face of the CDU's eastern strategy — a conservative who beat back an AfD challenge in 2021 by consolidating anti-far-right voters behind him. That strategy was not available to his successor. The AfD's Saxony-Anhalt branch is classified by domestic intelligence as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation, a designation that in past cycles depressed its ceiling. This time it did not.
The national backdrop mattered as much as the local one. Chancellor Friedrich Merz's federal coalition has spent 2026 struggling to revive growth in Europe's largest economy, and his own authority within the CDU has been visibly weakened since a chaotic cabinet reshuffle in late July. Polling through the summer put his approval near record lows while the AfD moved ahead of the CDU/CSU nationally. Merz had promised that his party would not be, in his words, destroyed by the far right, and had repeatedly ruled out cooperation with the AfD at federal level. Saxony-Anhalt was the first of three September state votes — Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern follow on September 20 — that were widely read as a referendum on that promise.
Key Developments
The AfD won 43.9 percent of the vote, according to preliminary official results with virtually all precincts counted. That is the highest share any party has taken in Saxony-Anhalt since reunification, and it is the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 that a party of the far right has finished first in a German state election. The party took 39 of the 83 seats in the new Landtag, a gain of 16.
The CDU, which had held the premiership continuously since 2002, fell to 17.2 percent and 15 seats — a collapse from the 40 seats it won in 2021 and its worst result in the state's history. The Social Democrats took 9.3 percent and eight seats, the Greens 8.9 percent and eight, the Left 8.6 percent and eight, and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance 5.3 percent and five, clearing the threshold at its first attempt in the state. The Free Democrats fell below five percent and lost their representation entirely.
Turnout was the story beneath the story. Roughly 77 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, an all-time high for the state and a jump of some seventeen points on the 60 percent recorded in 2021. Elections in eastern Germany have for years been characterised by disengagement; this one mobilised people who had stopped voting. That is a different phenomenon from a protest vote redistributing an existing electorate, and it is what makes the result difficult for the established parties to explain away.
And yet the AfD fell short. A majority in the 83-seat Landtag requires 42 seats. The party has 39. Its lead candidate, the 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund, had campaigned openly for an outright majority — the only route to power that does not require a partner, and the AfD has no plausible partners. Siegmund told supporters the party had made history and was taking the country back, and that a jolt was going through all of Germany. On the numbers, both claims and their limit are true at once: the AfD won the election and cannot form the government.
The seat distribution creates an unusual problem for everyone else. To reach 42 seats without the AfD, the CDU's 15 must be combined with at least 27 of the remaining 29 — which in practice means a four-party arrangement spanning the CDU, SPD, Greens and the Left, or some configuration involving the BSW. A CDU premier governing with the Left would break another long-standing conservative taboo, one the party has historically treated as almost as binding as the firewall itself. A minority government would leave the AfD as the decisive bloc on every contested vote.
Reactions
Schulze, the incumbent premier, acknowledged that the result had hit his party hard and said the CDU would have to live with it. Asked directly whether the firewall would remain in place, he initially declined to give a clear answer before saying he did not intend to cooperate with the AfD. That hesitation, brief as it was, was noted across the German press as a sign of how much pressure the convention is now under from the CDU's eastern branches, several of which have been arguing for months that pragmatic cooperation at municipal and state level is unavoidable.
Merz made no statement on Sunday evening. He convened the CDU leadership on Monday to assess the defeat. The absence of an immediate response was itself read as significant: the chancellor's standard line — that the AfD can be squeezed by adopting tougher positions on migration and crime while refusing to work with it — is precisely the strategy the Saxony-Anhalt result appears to have falsified. Merz has ruled out federal coalitions with the AfD repeatedly and has given no indication of changing that, but he now has to explain why a strategy of substantive convergence without cooperation produced a result in which his party finished more than twenty-six points behind.
The AfD's national leadership treated the outcome as vindication of its central argument about the firewall. Co-leader Alice Weidel called the result sensational and historic and said the party had received a clear mandate to govern in Saxony-Anhalt. Her co-leader Tino Chrupalla went further, saying the firewall had been definitively rejected by the voters. That framing — that a party finishing first has a democratic entitlement to office regardless of whether it can assemble a majority — is not how parliamentary systems work, but it is rhetorically potent, and it will be the AfD's message through the coming weeks of coalition negotiations from which it is excluded.
Among the losing parties, the reaction has been closer to disorientation than to strategy. The SPD, Greens and Left all finished within a point of each other in the high single digits, a compression that leaves none of them able to claim leadership of an anti-AfD bloc. Commentary from German and transatlantic policy institutes framed the vote as a threshold crossed rather than a single bad night, arguing that the question is no longer whether the AfD can win an eastern state but what happens the first time it wins one outright.
What's Next
The immediate business is coalition formation, and it will be slow. The new Landtag must convene and elect a minister-president, and no combination available to the non-AfD parties is comfortable. The likeliest arrangements all require the CDU to govern with parties to its left, including possibly the Left, which would hand the AfD a ready-made argument that the establishment ganged up to overturn the voters' choice. A CDU-led minority government would avoid that charge but would depend on ad hoc majorities in a chamber where the AfD controls nearly half the seats and has every incentive to make the state ungovernable.
There is also a structural consequence that outlasts the coalition talks. With 39 seats the AfD is close to the thresholds that matter for parliamentary procedure — appointments to state bodies, judicial and broadcasting oversight positions, and constitutional amendments that require two-thirds. A bloc of that size can obstruct without governing, and can force the other parties into repeated public bargains that reinforce the AfD's account of a closed political class.
The September 20 votes in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern come next. Berlin is not fertile ground for the AfD; polling has the combined left-of-centre parties near half the vote there. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is a different matter. The SPD won that state comfortably in 2021, but the AfD has since moved into the high twenties and is expected to finish first without a majority — a milder version of Sunday's outcome. Two eastern states in a fortnight with the AfD in front would make Saxony-Anhalt look less like an outlier than a pattern.
Beyond that lies the longer horizon the AfD itself keeps naming: the 2029 federal election. Party figures have been explicit that state-level breakthroughs are a staging post rather than a destination. Whether Saxony-Anhalt actually functions that way depends on things that have not yet happened — whether a workable government forms, whether the CDU's eastern wing holds to the firewall through four years of governing with the Left, and whether AfD voters who turned out in record numbers stay mobilised when the party they elected is kept out of office.
One caution is worth stating plainly. Figures reported through Sunday evening moved as counting progressed, and early exit polls put the AfD at around 44 percent and the CDU near 18 before preliminary official results settled at 43.9 and 17.2. Some outlets also differ slightly on the CDU's seat count. Final certified results are pending, and the precise numbers may shift marginally. The shape of the outcome — a record far-right first place, a historic CDU collapse, record turnout, and no majority for anyone — is not in dispute.
