Germany Contends With Far Right Resurgence After Big Turnout in Saxony-Anhalt Election

The Alternative for Germany party pulled off a large victory in state elections Sunday, exceeding by more than twice all its competitors, but its ability to govern alone will depend in part on whether a broad and unruly coalition will come together against it. Polling on Sunday evening in Saxony-Anhalt showed the AfD receiving nearly enough votes to form a government outright. It marks the first time a far-right group has won a statewide race since World War II. With 92.3 percent of the vote counted, AfD was at 45 percent while the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democratic Union, was pulling just 16.7 percent of the vote in the former East German communist state. Die Linke, or the Left Party, the Greens, and the Social Democrats were at 8.4, 8.8, and nine percent respectively. The left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, known as BSW, was at 5.2 percent. It must surpass the five percent threshold for seats or those seats will be redistributed, potentially enabling the AfD to gain enough votes to avoid the task of forming a coalition, which no other party has signaled its willingness to do.After results were reported, the head of the AfD, 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund, said he did not want to co-govern, though his group is just shy of the 42 needed for an outright majority. “We’ve achieved exactly what we set out to do,” Mr. Siegmund told public broadcasting station ARD after the vote count at Magdeburg, where he could be headed as the state’s next governor. “We’ve made history in this state.”He added that the federal republic “cannot carry on like this,” noting that voters are sending a signal of their discontent to Berlin and Mr. Merz. “Every day this man is in the chancellery is one too many,” he said.Speaking to another outlet, Mr. Siegmund’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, who took over last year as a tempering voice after several leaders offered propitiatory statements about the Nazi Party, called Sunday’s result “sensational” and said the party has “received a very clear mandate to govern here.” She also offered a conciliatory tone to form a state government with other parties. The AfD’s “hand is outstretched to all who want to make Saxony-Anhalt better and move Germany forward,” she said.Congratulations began rolling in Sunday by American conservatives like Senator Mike Lee, Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, and Elon Musk. But finding a partner to govern at home may be difficult. The group, largely shunned since its emergence in 2013, holds pro-Russia and anti-immigration stances. Mr. Siegmund is widely viewed as persona non grata among many mainstream parties. Der Speigel once named Mr. Siegmend “Germany’s most dangerous man.”Germany’s federal constitutional court could decide to deny the AfD rule by identifying it as unconstitutional based on Article 21, which has twice been invoked to ban parties that the court ruled subverted the democratic order.Born of anti-immigrant protests during the 2015 migration of one million Syrians to Germany, the AfD was denied authority to govern in the state of Thuringia in 2024, where a Christian Democratic governor took power with a minority government. AfD’s state chapters have been classified as terrorist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and racist by the country’s domestic intelligence agency. On the other hand, the party is gaining traction nationally, earning 21 percent of the vote in 2025’s federal election. Mr. Merz’s 28.5 percent in that election forced him to form a coalition with the Social Democrats. The next federal election is in 2029. The national general-secretary of the Christian Democrats, Franziska Hoppermann, said the party is holding its ground on not forming a coalition.“AfD is a right-wing extremist party. It wants to leave the euro; that would be an economic downfall … it works closely together with Russia, it wants a completely different social model,” Ms. Hopperman told The Associated Press. “We will not work with them.” However, the Christian Democrats have previously rejected forming a coalition with the left parties like Der Linke, making an anti-AfD firewall harder to achieve.Two more state votes will be held on September 20 in the states of Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the outcomes of which may indicate whether Mr. Siegmund’s campaign promoting mass deportations, changing the state slogan to “Think German,” and reintroducing the national anthem in schools is ascendant or limited.

Germany Contends With Far Right Resurgence After Big Turnout in Saxony-Anhalt Election

Germany Contends With Far Right Resurgence After Big Turnout in Saxony-Anhalt Election

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