AfD takes 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt and still cannot form a government

Saxony-Anhalt's election authority posted the preliminary count in the small hours of Monday. Alternative for Germany took 43.8% of the second vote and 39 of 83 seats in the Magdeburg Landtag. An absolute majority is 42. The party more than doubled its 20.8% from 2021. It still cannot govern on its own.

The Christian Democrats, who have led every state government here since 2002, fell to 17.2% and 15 seats. Five years ago they had 37.1%. It is their weakest result in a Saxony-Anhalt Landtag election. Minister-President Sven Schulze's three-party coalition is finished. The Free Democrats, his partners, took 2.6% and dropped out of the chamber.

Three parties of the left each landed near 9%: the Social Democrats on 9.3%, the Greens on 8.9%, Die Linke on 8.6%, eight seats apiece. Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW crossed the 5% line with 5.3% and five seats, its first entry into this parliament. Together the non-AfD parties hold 44 seats. No four-party bloc that excludes both the AfD and one of the others reaches 42. A government therefore means a chain from the CDU through the SPD and Greens to Die Linke and the BSW, or no government at all.

The first vote was harsher still. The AfD won 38 of 41 constituencies. Die Linke held three in Halle and Magdeburg. The CDU won none. MDR's count of the municipal map went further: the AfD finished first in all 218 Gemeinden. Ulrich Siegmund, the 35-year-old lead candidate, took his own seat with 49.0% against the CDU's Thomas Staudt. On election night he called the result a mandate to govern. Party co-leader Tino Chrupalla said Siegmund would be the next premier. Siegmund ruled out a coalition built on large concessions and dismissed a BSW idea of a cross-party minister-president as muddle.

Turnout was 77.8%, up from 60.3% in 2021 and the highest in the state since reunification. About 1.7 million people were eligible. That surge is the number that will travel beyond Magdeburg. Other European elections next year will be read against it.

The state's domestic intelligence service has classified the Saxony-Anhalt AfD as confirmed right-wing extremist. National sister parties treat the group as beyond coalition. That firewall is now the only thing standing between 39 seats and the Staatskanzlei. Schulze can try to assemble a minority cabinet that lives vote by vote. He can try a formal pact that includes Die Linke, a party the CDU has long refused. He can force a second election. Each path has a cost the count already priced in.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz's party ran the state for a generation. A 20-point drop in one night leaves him with a problem that is not local. If the firewall holds, Saxony-Anhalt may sit for months with a caretaker. If it breaks, the first AfD-led state government in the Federal Republic would sit in Magdeburg. The arithmetic on Monday morning allows both outcomes and blesses neither.

Seat math is simple enough to write down. AfD 39. CDU 15. SPD 8. Greens 8. Linke 8. BSW 5. Any government that keeps the firewall needs at least four of the five remaining groups. CDU plus SPD plus Greens plus Linke is 39, still three short. Add BSW and the number is 44. That is the only majority that does not include Siegmund's party. Whether those five groups can sit in one room is now the only question the voters left open.

Siegmund used the night to close other doors. He wants the premiership, not a junior role. He does not want a compromise figure chosen to spare the other parties a headline. That stance raises the odds of delay. German states have run on caretaker cabinets before. They have not often done so with the largest party locked out by a written taboo and with turnout at a post-1990 high.

What happens in Magdeburg will be read in Brussels and in every eastern Landtag that votes next. The numbers from 6 September are no longer a projection. They are a chamber: 39 seats for a party the other five say they will not take as a partner, and 44 seats that can form a government only if they agree to sit together. That is the fact the state has to govern with now.