German far-right AfD wins Saxony-Anhalt election, falls short of majority

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has won the election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, according to preliminary results.

AfD won 43.8 percent of the vote, according to preliminary official results. That is more than twice the 17.2 percent for the incumbent centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

“We have achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve,” said AfD’s lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund. “We have made history in this state.”

AfD co-leader Alice Weidel also hailed the “historic” result, which has given the far-right party a ‌clear mandate to govern, though it was not immediately clear whether it would be able to form a government.

Merz did not make a statement on Sunday evening on the election results. The German leader left the CDU’s head office, the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus, after 10pm local time (20:00 GMT).  

“The reality is the AfD has got the lion’s share of the votes in this election, according to the exit polls. But the question is: is it enough to get them control of the state? Right now, we cannot say for sure,” reported Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane from Magdeburg in eastern Germany.

The latest projections gave the AfD 39 of the state parliament’s 83 seats, leaving it three short of the 42 needed for an absolute majority in the state parliament in Magdeburg.

Siegmund said he wanted to extend a hand to all parties willing to bring about a fundamental political transformation in the state. However, the AfD will not bend to other parties’ will, he stressed.

The AfD has never participated in a governing coalition in Germany’s 16 states, nor in its federal government, as all other mainstream parties refuse to work with it, a policy infamously known as the “firewall”.

Tino Chrupalla, the AfD’s national co-leader, claimed the result showed that voters had rejected the governing coalition’s policy.

The mainstream parties “were voted out, or rather, the voters delivered a clear verdict, and I can only encourage them to recognise that the ‘firewall’ has been definitively rejected by the voters today,” Chrupalla told broadcaster ARD.

Saxony-Anhalt’s AfD branch has been classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation by the state’s domestic intelligence agency, a designation the party rejects as politically motivated.

Blow to Merz’s authority

Sunday’s result is another blow to the authority of Merz, whose popularity has declined as ‌his coalition government struggles to revive growth in Europe’s largest economy.

His centre-right CDU came a distant second. Incumbent Saxony-Anhalt state premier Sven Schulze congratulated the AfD and acknowledged that the result had hit his party hard, saying, “We’re going to have to live with this result”.

Schulze later said he did not intend to cooperate with the AfD, although he initially declined to give a clear answer when asked whether the CDU’s firewall would remain in place.

The projected parliamentary arithmetic would make forming a government exceptionally difficult. Schulze could attempt to assemble an alliance involving several parties, though the CDU has traditionally ruled out formal cooperation with both the AfD and the Left (Die Linke) party.

AfD has tapped into a sense of nostalgia for communist East Germany, as well as lingering resentment about the enduring wealth gap with the west decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

In line with the sometimes defiant sense of local “Ossie pride”, Siegmund has often ridden an East German-produced Simson Schwalbe bike, including to the polling booth on Sunday in his hometown of Tangermunde, with his wife in tow.

While Siegmund has been dubbed the friendly face of the AfD, his campaign promises have been radical, including targeting undocumented migrants with a “remigration and deportation offensive” from day one.

AfD’s agenda

The party’s anti-“woke” agenda also includes promises to replace LGBTQ pride rainbow flags at public schools with the German standard and to change history teaching to lessen the emphasis on Hitler’s Third Reich.

To replace migrant workers, the AfD wants to lure back German expatriates, while offering “baby bonuses” for families to reverse the shrinking population in the small state of 2.1 million.

The German Economic Institute has warned that the AfD’s immigration policy would be “ruinous” for Saxony-Anhalt, which is highly reliant on foreign-born workers, especially in the health sector.

Others have voiced fears that an AfD-run state security apparatus could leak sensitive information to Russia, which Moscow could use to destabilise Germany.

The Kremlin “makes no secret of the fact that the AfD is the most important instrument for destabilising Germany for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Thuringia state Interior Minister Georg Maier told the Handelsblatt daily newspaper.