Berlin — Sunday's election results did not give Germany's controversial AfD party automatic control of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, but what the far-right party achieved wasn't just an election victory. It was a political landslide. Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 43.8% of the vote in the legislative election, and while that may not be enough to form the next state government, it was the best result the party has achieved in any contest in its 13-year history.
Compared to the last state election in 2021, it more than doubled its share of the votes. The result was even more dramatic for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's center-right Christian Democratic Union. The CDU garnered only 17.2% of the votes in Saxony-Anhalt — plummeting from the 37.1% achieved in the last state election.
The CDU, which has led every Saxony-Anhalt state government since 2002, now trails the AfD by more than 26 percentage points. The results of the election show how fundamentally Germany's political system is changing. The AfD is no longer a fringe, anti-European Union protest party.
In Germany, winning an election does not automatically mean a party gets to run the government — whether it's a state or the nation. If the AfD had won just another percentage point or two of the vote on Sunday, it may well have garnered the absolute majority required in the state legislature to name the state's next leader and administration. Having not met that threshold, AfD Saxony-Anhalt still faces significant hurdles to become the state's governing party — but it isn't out of contention yet.
Following the election, the AfD will hold 39 of the 83 seats in the new state parliament. So, the AfD's leading candidate in the state, Ulrich Siegmund, is three seats short of the 42-seat absolute majority needed to form a new, all-AfD administration. And that's where complicated German coalition arithmetic comes into play.
The other parties that won a decent share of the votes on Sunday, including the CDU, have all flatly rejected joining a coalition government with the AfD. That collective refusal — a political line of demarcation backed by virtually all parties explicitly to keep a party seen as extremist out of power — is known in Germany as a "firewall." The firewall has held for decades, but now a left-wing populist party could be poised to poke a hole in it in Saxony-Anhalt. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) received 5.3% of the vote on Sunday, giving it five seats in the state legislature.
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