AfD leads Saxony-Anhalt polls at 41 percent ahead of Sunday's vote

Voters in Saxony-Anhalt elect a new state parliament on Sunday. Every recent poll puts Alternative for Germany first, and well ahead of the Christian Democrats who have run the state. Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, working for ZDF and interviewing 1,044 eligible voters between 1 and 3 September, gave the AfD 41 percent and the CDU 23 percent. Insa, in a survey for Nius, had the AfD at 43 percent and the CDU at 22 percent. In 2021 the CDU won the state with 37.1 percent. The AfD took 20.8 percent.

No far-right party has led a German state government since 1945. That streak is what Sunday can break. It may not. Other parties have said they will not form a coalition with the AfD. If the party falls short of a seat majority, a CDU-led alliance can still lock it out of the state chancellery in Magdeburg. Incumbent premier Sven Schulze, of Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU, is running for another term. He has called the vote a decision that will set the course for Germany.

The AfD's lead candidate is Ulrich Siegmund, 35, a former CDU member. Der Spiegel called him the most dangerous man in Germany. The state office of the domestic intelligence service has classified the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt as far-right extremist. The party has gone to court over that label. Its manifesto, titled The Country First, calls for an end to the right of asylum, confiscation of cash and assets from asylum seekers, and mass deportations. It also wants closer ties with Russia and an exit from the euro.

The arithmetic is not only about first place. Germany's 5 percent threshold decides who enters the Landtag. The Left is near 12 percent in some polls. The Social Democrats are near 7 percent. The Greens hover around 5 to 6 percent. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance is near 4 percent. The Free Democrats, partners in the current CDU-SPD-FDP government in Magdeburg, are near 3 percent and may fall out. Twenty-six percent of the ZDF sample said they were not sure whom they would back, or whether they would vote at all.

That uncertainty cuts two ways. A high AfD score plus the disappearance of small parties can manufacture a seat majority even if the vote share is short of 50 percent. A late shift to the CDU, or a stronger Left, can leave Siegmund as the largest faction leader with no path to a cabinet.

Saxony-Anhalt is poor by western German standards, short of workers, and marked by the same arguments over immigration and energy costs that have lifted the AfD across the east. Merz's federal government is unpopular. The AfD leads some national polls. Party officials treat Sunday as a rehearsal for state votes later this month in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin, and for the federal election due in 2029.

Schulze can still survive. German statecraft after the war was built to keep a plurality from becoming power when every other party refuses to deal. That firewall is the actual prize. If it holds, the AfD will have the largest caucus and no ministries. If it cracks, a German state will have a premier whose party the local intelligence service calls extremist.

The last day of campaigning is Saturday. The count on Sunday night will be read in Berlin, Paris and Warsaw as a test of whether the postwar rule still binds in the one state where the numbers look ready to break it.

Siegmund has spent the close of the campaign saying the point is to govern, not to protest. That sentence is the threat the other parties hear. A party that only collects protest votes can be managed. A party that wants the interior ministry in Magdeburg wants data, police and the power to write deportation rules for a state of two million people. Whether he gets that office depends on a few thousand votes and on whether the Greens and the Left clear 5 percent. Those two numbers are the entire election.