AfD landslide win routs Merz’s CDU in Saxony Anhalt, jolts German politics

Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany, or Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), has won a landslide election victory in Saxony-Anhalt, more than doubling its vote and delivering a humiliating defeat to Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives.

Official preliminary results released on Monday, 7 September, showed the AfD taking 43.8% of Sunday’s vote, up 23 percentage points from the previous state election. Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) fell to 17.2%, a collapse of almost 20 points.

Turnout jumped to 77.8% from 60.3% five years earlier.

The AfD won 39 of the state parliament’s 83 seats, leaving it just short of an outright majority. That puts Germany’s other parties in a difficult position because they have repeatedly ruled out governing with the party under the country’s political “firewall” against the far right.

AfD leaders moved quickly on Monday to exploit the arithmetic, appealing to CDU lawmakers to break ranks and support an AfD-led state government.

The result gives the party its strongest performance in a German state election and leaves Merz confronting precisely the political outcome his strategy was supposed to prevent.

The chancellor has argued that tougher policies on migration, crime and economic management could win voters back from the AfD while preserving the CDU’s refusal to cooperate with it.

Saxony-Anhalt suggests that calculation has not worked, at least in one of the AfD’s eastern German strongholds.

The CDU lost support in several directions, but the movement toward the AfD was particularly damaging. Reuters estimated that about 83,000 former CDU voters switched to the far-right party.

Economic frustration, migration and anger at the federal government helped shape the campaign. Eastern Germany has long been stronger territory for the AfD, but Sunday’s scale of victory raises the stakes nationally.

The regional AfD organization has been classified as right-wing extremist by Saxony-Anhalt’s domestic intelligence authorities. That status has reinforced the CDU and other parties’ resistance to cooperation.

Keeping the AfD out of power, however, is becoming mathematically harder.

The Social Democrats won 9.3%, the Greens 8.9%, the Left 8.6% and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance 5.3%, according to the official preliminary count.

Those numbers leave the CDU needing an unusually broad arrangement if it is to help build a government without the election winner.

The immediate question is who can govern Saxony-Anhalt. The bigger one is what happens to Germany’s firewall if the AfD keeps winning enough votes to make governing around it increasingly difficult.

Merz has insisted that cooperation remains off the table. After Sunday, maintaining that line may require ever more complicated coalitions, while abandoning it would transform German politics.