AfD's Tobias Rausch takes the Saxony-Anhalt speaker's chair with 48 votes

Tobias Rausch of the Alternative for Germany was elected speaker of the Saxony-Anhalt parliament in Magdeburg on Tuesday, the first time the party has held a state parliamentary speakership. He is 35. He received 48 votes in an 83-seat house. The AfD holds 39 seats, so the margin came from outside the party.

The state election was in September. The AfD took almost 44 percent of the vote and 39 seats, three short of a majority. Four parties that formally refuse cooperation with the AfD, the Christian Democrats of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, The Left, the Greens and the Social Democrats, also hold 39 seats between them. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance holds enough seats that, with the AfD, the two have 44, and 42 are needed for a majority. Rausch's 48 votes mean at least four lawmakers from outside that pair backed him. Five others abstained. The BBC reported that five of the extra votes came from the BSW, and that four further MPs, not identified, also voted for him.

Rausch said after the vote that "the days of political firewalls should be a thing of the past," rejecting the post-war practice of not working with the far right. Greens leader Susan Sziborra-Seidlitz said a line had been crossed. Protesters outside the building held banners reading "Never again is now." Alice Weidel, the AfD's national co-leader, called the result a great success. DPA noted that Rausch is the highest elected official in the party's 13-year history.

The office is real and limited. The speaker chairs debates, controls access to the parliament building, and represents the house at official events. He does not appoint the state government. The boost, as DPA put it, is for the AfD's lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund, who wants to be the party's first state premier. A speaker from the party makes that ambition look closer. It does not complete it. Siegmund still needs a majority that the September result did not quite give him.

The unidentified four are the fact that will occupy the other parties this week. A firewall that loses four unnamed votes on the first sitting is a firewall with a hole in it. The five abstentions matter almost as much. An abstention is not a vote for Rausch, but it lowers the number he needs. Between the BSW's open support and the four unnamed votes, the post-war convention failed in Magdeburg on a recorded division, not in a commentary.

Saxony-Anhalt's domestic intelligence service has classified the state AfD as a confirmed extremist organisation. That classification did not bar Rausch from standing, and it did not bar other MPs from voting for him. The legal effect of the label and the political effect of the vote are now in the same building. He will chair the sessions in which that contradiction is debated.

The national reading is the one Merz has to answer. His CDU is one of the four parties on 39 seats that refuse cooperation. If any of the four unnamed votes came from his group, the refusal has already been broken in a state parliament. If they did not, the break is elsewhere, and the CDU's problem is that it could not stop the election. Neither version leaves the firewall intact.

The September result is the baseline for every later vote in this house. Almost 44 percent and 39 of 83 seats is a plurality large enough to take the speaker's chair with a handful of outside votes, and not large enough to elect a premier alone. Rausch's election uses the first of those facts. Siegmund's bid for the premiership depends on the second. The BSW's five votes for the speaker do not automatically become five votes for a state government. Coalition talks, if they happen, will have to be conducted in a parliament whose chair is already from the AfD.

BBC correspondent Paul Kirby noted that not since the Second World War has a far-right party held a German state speakership. That historical line is what the banners outside were answering. Inside, the division was 48 for Rausch, with five abstentions and the rest against or absent from the winning column. The figure to keep is 48 in a house of 83, against a party bench of 39.